We're back! Didja miss us? Yes, we finally stumbled back into AtAT's Boston-area studios last night, thus bringing the most technically disastrous AtAT Midwestern Holiday Tour on record to a much-welcome end. In addition to our wonderfully dramatic PowerBook death at 30,000 feet, we also endured two rather bracing Visor hard crashes (complete with painful data loss, of course), and upon our return, we discovered that the boot disk in AtAT's primary production workhorse had apparently kicked its little read/write head in the air and moved on to Magnetic Storage Heaven. We have since revived the system, but it's still feeling a little rickety. After all, it's a PowerTower Pro that's almost four years old; that's, like, 120 in computer years, and even the company who made the thing kicked the bucket ages ago. This latest mishap has us thinking even more seriously about biting the bullet and buying a sparkly new Mac.

And what timing, right? We take a few days off for the New Year, figuring that not much could possibly be happening in the world of Apple right now, and we almost completely miss the fact that Apple has seemingly transformed itself into Crazy Steve's Discount Mac Outlet. Have you seen the new prices? Over the weekend, the sticker prices of all of Apple's "professional" systems suddenly dropped through the floor; according to the San Jose Mercury News, the discounts ran "as steep as $1000." You don't have to take their word for it, though; just poke around the Apple Store and drool at the low, low prices. A top-of-the-line, dual-500 MHz Power Mac G4 for only $2499? A primo, 500 MHz PowerBook for just $2199? "Must... resist... urge... to buy!... Credit cards... maxed... out!"

Now, even if you're still hung over from your New Year's celebration, you've probably drawn a couple of obvious conclusions from Crazy Steve's latest round of insane price cuts. For one thing, Apple didn't have a very merry Christmas; evidently all those rebates didn't get the job done, because desperate price reductions like these mean that Apple is doing everything it can to clear the channel of excess inventory short of stapling heart-shaped tags to each system, calling them "Beanie Macs," and announcing that "Sawtooth the Power Mac" and "Pismo the PowerBook" are about to be "retired." (Indeed, PC Data reports that Apple's sales dropped by a factor of 40% during the holiday buying frenzy. Yowch!)

But the other obvious conclusion is that Apple needs the current Power Macs and PowerBooks out of the channel now, now, NOW because Steve will be taking the wraps off the 2001 models in less than a week. For anyone who's still skeptical about faster Power Macs and a new PowerBook G4 on deck for the Expo, a quick gander at the jaw-droppingly low prices at the Apple Store ought to erase any lingering doubts. Notice, also, that with the new low prices comes a decided lack of configurability; in its desperate bid to get last year's models out the door, Apple has eliminated built-to-order options on both the Power Macs and the PowerBooks. (The discounted Cube retains its build-to-order capability, so consider its price reduction an admission of overpricing in the first place.)

Decisions, decisions... should we get a cheap G4 now, or stick it out for another week and see what else we can spend our money on? Oh, heck, we'll probably just wait. As much as we'd like to help Apple get those soon-to-be-obsolete systems out of the channel and into our studios, we're suckers for the Next Big Thing, and now that we've endured the year-long 500 MHz drought and the endless wait for Mac OS X, six days hardly constitutes a wait at all. But don't let us stop you from picking up a kickin' Mac at fire sale prices.