Well, let's skip right over the told-ya-sos and try to ignore the wailing cries, the tearing of hair, and the gnashing of teeth for a moment, shall we? It's tough, we know, what with all those former optimists railing in disbelief over the sheer injustice of a Stevenote with no new gear. The fact that Apple just revised over 60% of its hardware line a mere six weeks ago? Immaterial. The complete and utter lack of a webcast for a domestic keynote? Irrelevant. Apple's own PR flunkies explicitly warning people that there would be no major new Apple products during Seybold? Neither here nor there. No matter what reason, logic, or public statement dictates, everyone knows that when Steve is on stage, he delivers his spiel, and then always says there's "one more thing." Except this time.

So-- no PowerBook G4, no revised iBook, and no Mac OS X public beta. (There was also no Macs-for-handguns trade-in program, but that was pretty much a long shot even by yesterday's standards.) But let's focus on what we did learn from Steve's latest public address, shall we? The biggest news, of course, is that Mac OS X finally has a solid release date. Well, okay, no, it doesn't-- the 1.0 version of Apple's fresh-faced new operating system is now due "very early next year," which could mean two days before June ends, for all we know. But what we do have is an actual set date for the release of the long-awaited public beta: September 13th, a mere two weeks away and a full ten days before Steve's self-imposed "summer" deadline. In other words, folks, we're getting it early. Just keep telling yourself that.

Now, frankly, we don't know what to do with ourselves. We've been waiting for some form of Mac OS X (in our opinion, for various reasons, Mac OS X Server doesn't count) for so long that two weeks seems like an infinitesimal length of time. It's been over three months since we were told the public beta would ship this summer. It's been almost nine months since we were first given a tantalizing glimpse of Aqua. Over fifteen months have elapsed since we first heard the name "Mac OS X" (and we were told it'd ship by Q3 1999). Over three and a half years have tumbled by since Apple bought NeXT and promised us a new, modern Mac OS called Rhapsody. And if you want to count the Copland years, too, well, you're talking over five years total-- more, if you dig back to the Taligent and Pink days. In short, two weeks is a mere eye-blink compared to the time we've all done in OS jail so far-- we can do this standing on our heads.

Of course, it's only really two weeks if you're lucky enough to be attending the Stevenote at Apple Expo in Paris, where we strongly suspect that all attendees will be given public beta CD-ROMs free of charge. The rest of us will probably have to order a copy for $20 or so and wait for it to arrive by mail. (The size of the operating system, as well as the underlying complexity of its installation, implies to us that an Internet download won't be an option.) Even factoring in snail-mail delivery times, though, the bottom line is that the beta is close. Very close. And we can hardly wait to play the high-tech equivalent of Russian Roulette by blithely installing that dangerous pre-release operating system on everything in sight, productivity and uptime be damned. "Unsupported configuration" our Aunt Fanny. Bring it on!