You know, it's nice to know that we can take some time off every once in a while to deal with the fallout of post-reproductive sleep loss and find that when we once again have the energy to turn our attention back to the drama in the world of Apple, fundamentally, nothing's changed. Oh, sure, stuff may have shifted in context slightly; three and a half years ago, "three pizzas" was the monthly cost of buying a new iMac on the "Bleed Me 'Til I'm Dry" payment plan, whereas now it's what we might be able to buy with the proceeds after liquidating our cratered AAPL holdings following last week's earnings warning. But the important stuff is all still in effect. For example, as faithful viewer Alpha Dan points out, G4-maker Motorola is still printing up pink slips like they can be used as legal tender; nothing new there, and at this rate, the only surprise is that Moto still had 7,000 employees left to lay off. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (For the unschooled, that's French for "I would also like a book of matches.")

Likewise, faithful viewer T.S. McBride (and most of the rest of this planet's mammalian population) notes that John C. Dvorak is evidently still smoking the same low-grade crack that led him to predict that the original iMac and iBook would both be dismal failures; now he's denigrating the switchers in Apple's new "Real People" ads as being "goofy looking shlubs" when he, himself, looks like this. Heck, the only reason ol' Crackpipe John doesn't have his-- well, for lack of a better term, we suppose we'll call it a "face"-- immortalized next to the definition of "shlub" in the American Heritage Dictionary is because he failed to pass Houghton Mifflin's mandatory drug screening. (Apparently even PC Magazine's editors have given up on trying to coax any sort of coherence from John's tripped-out scrawls. Ignoring for a moment his research-challenged spelling of Steven as "Stephen" and Aaron as "Aron," just bathe in the heady glow of this gem of literary clarity: "I don't think the company is not going on the offensive." Bravo. Geez, if they can't clean him up, can they at least get Dvorak off the crack and onto, say, horse? At least heroin addicts occasionally write something interesting.)

Moreover, it's not just the long-term trends that appear to be continuing. Earlier this month (when we thought we were actually going to be able to get back on a regular broadcast schedule before Anya would sleep through the night, har de har har) we raised the unsettling possibility that iMac demand might be dropping off even as Apple had finally ironed out its supply problems. Well, that "might" is looking less and less iffy these days; by now you've probably noticed that CNET has reported that distributor Ingram Micro had over 2600 LCD iMacs in stock earlier this week, and orders from dealers for fewer than 200 of those pups-- a disparity amounting to "more than 15 weeks' worth of inventory," which ARS analyst Matt Sargent describes as "definitely disconcerting." Yowza.

If you're not the type to be unnecessarily alarmist (oh, you're no fun anymore), it's perhaps worth noting that the entire personal computer industry is reportedly in a nasty slump these days, so it's not just Apple having trouble moving merchandise. And you've probably also noticed that Macworld Expo is just around the corner, which means we're mired squarely in that traditional sales slump that always precedes a Stevenote, as wary potential buyers hold off to avoid getting burned just in case His Mercurialness plans to introduce a $99 Power Mac G5 with integrated Cuisinart and self-cleaning lint brush. Still, between this potential iMac pile-up and the whole revenue shortfall bag-of-angst, next month's quarterly results conference call has the potential to be a real powder keg, dramatically speaking. We can hardly wait! And it's good to see first-hand that the one constant in this game is that there's always something out there in Macville to inflame an ulcer or two...