Okay, now we know that we're slipping in our old age. Remember last month when we did a scene on a new Apple patent that had Mac obsessives all abuzz? Said patent covered "multiple personas for mobile devices," and included references to and diagrams of a handheld device that was clearly a Newton MessagePad 130. At the time, we assumed that the most drama we could wrench out of the situation was to play it up as a surefire harbinger of the Newton's return from the dead. Man, how wrong were we?

See, it turns out that The Register has hit upon the real motherlode of drama embedded in this whole "multiple personas" patent spiel: they surmise that Apple is attempting to patent "Fast User Switching," one of the hundred-odd zesty new features in Mac OS X 10.3, otherwise known as Panther. "But AtAT," you ask, "isn't 'Fast User Switching' a feature that Apple took from Windows?" Why, yes it is, little Timmy! In fact, Steve Jobs plainly admitted that fact onstage when he first gave us an eyeful of Apple's improved implementation. But remember, the patent is a continuation of one that Apple filed way back in 1995, which seriously predates the feature's inclusion in any operating system that Microsoft had slapped together by then.

According to The Reg, the new patent application contains some telltale changes to the original, such as referring to "one of multiple personas available on the computer system and associated with one or more users of the computer system," whereas the original patent apparently mentions personas only in a single-user scenario. Obviously, then, this is all about Fast User Switching and Apple's trying to patent the technology now in an attempt to gain a little leverage against Microsoft, should the Redmond Giant decide to drop the Mac version of Office the same way that it dropped Internet Explorer. We don't know why we never saw it before.

Well, okay, to be fair, when we produced the original scene Steve hadn't yet delivered his WWDC keynote and shown off the "Because We Can" rotating cube effect that instantaneously transformed "Fast User Switching" from something that Windows has that Microsoft maybe didn't rip off from somebody else into a must-have feature that has Mac users who live alone attempting to induce Dissociative Identity Disorder just so they have an actual reason to use it. Had news of the patent surfaced after the Stevenote, we might have had a fighting chance at spotting the real drama the way The Reg managed to do-- but ultimately, that's just an excuse, and now we look forward to that stage of our careers known as the "Ever-Declining Quality/Riding Out The Clock" phase. Woo-hoo!!