Back at the dawn of time, before AtAT had yet dragged itself forth from the primordial ooze, there was an epoch known to Apple paleontologists as "1996-1997." During that time, Apple was run by a specimen called Gilius Ameliosus, or "Gil" for short. Some of you will remember ol' Gil, the Semiconductor Suit assigned the daunting task of pulling Apple out of its vertical death plunge. To be fair, only the rarest Übermensch could pull off such a task, and in his own way, he did just that-- by buying NeXT and bring Stevius Jobius back on board. But before that, Gil oversaw the release of a lot of Macs we classify both chronologically and otherwise as "Amelioisms." There's the boxy, beige, trying-to-look-a-PC Power Mac 4400. There's the boxy, black, trying-to-look-like-a-PC-laptop, might-burst-into-flames PowerBook 5300. There's the lumpy, oversized, underpowered Performa 6x00 series. And so forth.

But there were also some real standout Amelioisms, like the fabled Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. This thing was (and is) cool. Integrated LCD display, custom-designed Bose sound system, a bronze-looking finish on delicate swoops and curves-- wow. When we first saw one in the summer of 1997, we immediately started calculating whether selling everything we owned at fair market price would have yielded enough money to let us buy one. The answer was a resounding "no"-- since the TAM cost an embolism-popping $7500 when it was first introduced.

Now, for that kind of dough, one would expect that Apple might have taken special pains to avoid the kind of quality control "issues" that plagued the rest of its lineup, right? But nooooooo... In addition to having the sort of performance one would expect from the 603e processor and slow bus of a $7500 tricked-out PowerBook 3400, it soon became apparent that, on many systems, the awesome-looking Bose sound system had a significant problem: a constant hiss or static crackle emanating from the speakers.

Steve, ever anxious to rid the world of all Amelioisms, has apparently instituted an intriguing repair process for hissing TAMs. According to MacNN, it goes something like this: 1) User sends in hissing TAM. 2) Apple sends back a brand new Power Mac G4. 3) Steve personally smashes the TAM to powder with an axe handle whilst screaming "Die, Gil Spawn, DIE!!" (We're using a little license in describing step 3, there, but given how badly Steve hates computer noise, we figure he'd want to make sure he sent the hissing speakers to Silicon Hell in his own inimitable fashion.) So basically, as cool as it looked, it seems that Apple is giving up on the TAM as a failed experiment. C'est la vie. Hey, maybe it's just us, but we'd have thought that Apple would instead be replacing faulty TAMs with what the twentieth anniversary Mac should have been-- the G4 Cube and a 15-inch LCD Studio Display. Go figure.