Cupertino, we have a problem: apparently there's nothing for any of us to buy. Well, okay, that's clearly an exaggeration, but there's more than a grain of truth to it; for one thing, Apple itself has stopped taking orders for iMacs citing lack of inventory until the new models ship in September. And Power Macs? Well, the low-end and mid-range configs are showing ship dates of "3-5 business days" at the Apple Store, but the dual-2.5 GHz model (you know, the one that's actually faster since eleven months ago) only says "July," which is just vague enough to be suspicious. And given the iMac drought, AppleInsider reports that demand for eMacs has understandably skyrocketed to a level "far exceeding available inventory," putting them in "extremely limited supply." So the choices for a desktop Mac are quickly dwindling to slim pickin's indeed.

How about on the music front? Well, everybody knows that miniPods ("4 weeks" lead time at the Apple Store) are still tougher to spot on store shelves than neckties at a nudist colony, but now AI claims that supplies of the 15 GB "vanilla" iPod are starting to run dry as well, possibly in readiness for the launch of fourth-generation devices in September. Displays? The shortest lead time on Apple's swanky new aluminum-clad offerings is "2-4 weeks," with the 30-inch models bleeding over into "August." After taking one of those perspective-clearing "steps back," it's starting to look like the shelves are awfully bare right now. It's not much of a cheese shop, is it?

Ah, but we haven't mentioned laptops-- which are "said to be in good supply." So good supply, in fact, that, since Apple has practically nothing else to sell anyone for the next several weeks, the company has reportedly taken to calling "customers who had logged into the store with an Apple ID, configured a laptop order in their shopping cart, but did not proceed to checkout" to ask them one vital question: "What, are you chicken?"

In other words, if you were serious enough about getting a new PowerBook that you'd actually gotten so far as to have put one in your virtual cart, Apple isn't above getting on the horn and trying to nudge you over the edge into exciting new depths of rampant credit card debt. Apparently Apple has a number of unspecified "special deals" with which it's been trying to lure fence-sitters into finally taking the plunge; we're tempted to throw a 17-incher into the cart and wait for the phone call just to hear the details... but no, we suppose that'd be cruel, building their hopes up like that. Poor lil' fellas.

For the record, we've actually heard reports of Apple phoning up people with full carts or who had used the Apple Store's "Save for later" function pretty much ever since the store first went live almost seven years ago, but the timing here (and the laptop focus of these hard-sell tactics) just struck us as interesting. Here's hoping that Apple manages to limp past this "major product supply gap" without getting too desperate, because there's nothing sadder than a computer company having to go all Donner Party or something just to survive. Hang in there, people-- September's a-comin'!