Wave bye-bye to summer, kiddies, 'cause it's gone, gone, gone; at some point over the weekend, we officially clicked over into autumn (well, at least in our hemisphere), which means the days of beach volleyball and backyard cookouts are now over. On the other hand, seeing as here at AtAT we're not really beach-volleyball-and-backyard-cookout sort of people, personally, we're digging the change; the end of summer also heralds the end of summer reruns, it's easier to get to sleep (on those rare occasions when we find we have time to bother), the leaves all turn nifty colors, and since we're working stiffs, we get to feel really good about not having to go back to school. Who knew there was an upside to not having summer vacation?

Of course, the other noteworthy thing about our headlong plunge into fall is this: Apple's late. Even slightly later than late, actually. You may recall that way back in March when Steve rolled out Mac OS X 10.0, it was missing some pretty key features, such as CD-burning support, DVD playback, and a compatible version of iDVD. At the time, Steve announced that CD-RW support would arrive in an update "next month," DVD playback was slated for "sometime in the spring," and iDVD for Mac OS X would show up "later this spring or early summer."

Well, Apple almost made that first deadline; Mac OS X 10.0.2 (which featured audio CD-burning capabilities via iTunes) surfaced on May 2nd, just a couple of days late... of course, we still couldn't burn data CDs, but that's a mere technicality. iDVD looked like it might ship on time, since in July Steve announced that the Mac OS X-only iDVD 2 would materialize in September. That's still likely to happen, but as of a couple of days ago, it missed its end-of-summer target. As for DVD playback, well, that's way overdue-- spring ended three months ago.

Still, all the good stuff we've been missing-- even Disc Burner support and a healthy dollop of raw speed that brings to mind the mental image of Speedy Gonzales all sugared up on mochas-- is coming to us in Mac OS X 10.1, which, as we mentioned last week, is now officially done. And guess what else autumn has brought us? That's right: Seybold. Phil Schiller's keynote address is tomorrow, and if Macworld UK is correct (which is pretty likely-- this isn't exactly a tough thing to predict), 10.1 will indeed be the star of the show tomorrow. We're figuring on an official release either tomorrow or this coming Friday, so get your update mojo workin'.

Incidentally, you may have heard a wacky rumor about Apple retail stores not handing out free 10.1 update CD-ROMs, but actually burning a copy for any customer who saunters in with a blank CD-R. We've considered that pretty unlikely all along (the store personnel have nothing better to do but burn CDs for the customers?), but we're coming right down to the wire, here, and various sources still insist that this is indeed the way it's going to work. Even stranger, faithful viewer Spaceman Spiff claims that the "Hey, Barkeep, Burn Me A Slug O' Puma" distribution strategy isn't limited to Apple's own stores; his local CompUSA told him that they're going to be burning copies of 10.1 for customers next week. It sounds like a painfully inefficient way to distribute software, but hey, whatever.