Thought Apple's iTunes 2.0 installer bug-- you remember, the one that sent gigabytes of user data to that Great Bitbucket In The Sky last Friday night-- was just a fluke? Well, here at AtAT we're always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, so we sure did... only now we're starting to think that maybe Apple's software quality control team is off on a cycling tour of Europe or something, because fairly massive "issues" seem to be coming out of Apple with alarming regularity lately.

Here's the latest: faithful viewer Lombard Roadkill (who really should consider suing Ma and Pa Roadkill for giving him that name) reports that he's an unfortunate PowerBook user who, after installing Apple's latest Mac OS X Security Update, suddenly found himself completely unable to start up Classic; when he tries, it just sits there forever with a grey screen. Mac OS 9, on the other hand, boots just fine-- it's only Classic that's hosed. However, for most Mac OS X users, that's a pretty serious handicap, considering how many of us depend on non-native applications to get our work done every day. (We, ourselves, would be far less productive if we had to keep booting into Mac OS 9 just to play Monopoly.)

And this is by no means an isolated thingule: an article over at The Mac Observer confirms that mostly PowerBook G4 owners are getting hit with the bug, but we've been receiving reports from owners of other PowerBook models that have also been rendered Classicless. If this is Apple's subtle way of telling us that we should all start paying to upgrade to Carbonized applications, maybe they should have waited until there are more than six of them available.

But back to the quality control issue for a second... By far the most disturbing aspect of this whole "Dead Classic" nightmare is that several people are reporting that their brand new PowerBooks fail to launch Classic, right out of the box. That strikes us as a pretty glaring thing to miss on Apple's part. Maybe this is just a phase. We'll know for sure if, say, Mac OS X 10.1.1 ships without a DVD player-- and a Finder.