Attention, all you still-waiting PowerBook G4 customers, who are probably feeling more than a little like characters in a Beckett play by now: we have good news and bad news. The good news is that many of your orders have shipped-- we repeat, your orders have shipped. Apple has kept up its end of the bargain, and to save time has sent your PowerBooks winging their various ways direct from the assembly plant in Taiwan. The bad news is that now you have to wait for the FDA to allow customs to let your titanium laptops into Alaska.

Okay, we admit, that's a little more surrealism than is generally called for on a Monday, but we just couldn't resist. So pour yourself an extra cup of coffee and shake off the last of the weekend fuzzies, because as faithful viewer Timmy pointed out, MacCentral is indeed reporting that many Apple Store customers tracking their PowerBooks via FedEx numbers are discovering that their orders made it all the way from Taiwan to Alaska, but are now "tied up in customs red tape." One customer states that FedEx went so far as to say "we have no idea when you'll get it now." (Hey, at least they're honest, right?) Another customer states that Apple is aware of the Alaskan logjam, which apparently affects "a large shipment" of the long-awaited PowerBooks.

Why the holdup in customs? Beyond the Kafkaesque nightmare that can only be expected when a governmental bureaucracy is involved, we can only guess. But one problem might be that we're dealing with not one bureaucracy, but two: Federal Express is apparently claiming that "the U.S. Food and Drug Administration" has leapt into the fray, due to its "jurisdiction over electronic products using lasers," which of course includes titanium laptops with nifty slot-loading DVD-ROM drives. Hmmm... Suppose this is the reason why Sony's VAIOs lack built-in optical drives? Steve called it a VAIO drawback, but evidently the man was too clever for his customers' own good; built-in DVD be damned-- if not for that feature, titanium PowerBooks would be cheap and plentiful! (Never mind that every other Mac on the market has a laser device, too, and rarely seems to get stopped in Alaska; clearly the presence of titanium changes everything.)

Anyway, this stuff actually all happened last week, so unless the slow-grinding wheels of the U.S. government are in particularly rare form, we're guessing that Alaska has since disgorged that PowerBook clot and the individual units are even now heading to their various and sundry owners. Of course, we've been unjustly optimistic in the past-- and those of you who just had to get your order custom-built with a bigger hard drive or more RAM are still subject to that pesky February 24th ship date. Of course, hopefully by then Apple will have greased the Alaskan rails a bit, so you won't have to wait even longer while some customs guy prods your PowerBook to see if a laser comes shooting out.