Statistically speaking, given how much TV your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff watches on an average day (once estimated at 26 hours per person; we've been told that there are far more important uses for our breakthrough time-dilation device, but we find that highly unlikely), when Apple starts running a new commercial, we're usually among the first to see it. Every once in a while, though, one slips by us due to circumstances beyond our control. We can't watch everything-- and don't think for a moment that we don't spend most commercial breaks fuming at the injustice of it all.

For instance, in the "real world," Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) happens to be a lawyer, and like many of her ilk, she suffers from the dreaded "real law is nothing like that" syndrome. The result is a woeful inability to enjoy most shows featuring lawyers who actually have time to go to the bathroom (even a non-unisex one), let alone spend most evenings dancing in nightclubs and cheating on their spouses. Couple that with the fact that whenever either of us sees Calista Flockhart we're distracted by an overwhelming urge to hold her down and make her eat a sandwich, and the end result is that the AtAT staff doesn't watch Ally McBeal.

So when Apple, in its infinite wisdom, decides to debut a new ad spot during Ally instead of Buffy, we're left out of the loop; as far as we can tell, it's not up on Apple's site yet either. Fortunately, we're blessed with a viewership who can keep us abreast of these developments when events conspire to exclude us. Faithful viewer Mario Juestel was kind enough to inform us that approximately twenty minutes into the Ally season premiere (when the AtAT staff was loving Raymond-- strictly in an appropriate viewer-entertainer sort of relationship, of course), Fox aired a brand new Apple commercial advertising Mac.com email addresses. This surprise ad reportedly features "several people saying their email addresses (for example, pattib@mac.com, jason@mac.com, etc.)" and then shows "an Indigo iMac with the voiceover 'Get your own mac.com email address along with 4 million other iMac owners'" or something to that effect.

So Apple is pushing iTools on the tube, now. Good! This evidently commences the marketing direction that Steve mentioned during last week's wonderfully bleak earnings report-- namely, that Apple needs to start playing up stuff that people can do on Macs that they can't do on that "other platform." But why choose to push the free email over KidSafe, iDisk, and HomePage? A Mac.com email address isn't exactly a deal-making selling point. It's not like Wintel users can't get free email elsewhere; heck, with a little persistence and know-how, they can even get Mac.com addresses if they really want to. In any case, though, we welcome the new Mac.com commercial for two reasons: one, it heralds what we hope are a series of iTools commercials meant to tout several nice Mac-only services; and two, it means we might not be seeing that Cube commercial seven hundred times a day anymore. Guess we'll find out for sure on tonight's Buffy.