Consarn these kids today with their newfangled toys and gadgets! In our day, our action figures didn't have any fleebity-flobble "67 points of articulation"-- Spider-Man's arms went up and down, the head maybe turned a little side to side, and that was it. What's more, they were choking hazards and constructed cheaply from highly flammable substances, but did we complain? No, we didn't-- mostly because we were choking to death and on fire at the time, but even with unobstructed tracheae, you can bet we still wouldn't have whined about a little oxygen deprivation and some napalm-like stuff sticking to our skins, because we knew it built character.

Oxygen. Pfft! Kids today don't even appreciate it.

And what's with Mommy and Daddy buying them all the latest gear? In our day we didn't have any of these here "allowances"; if we wanted to buy the latest crappy toy, we had to raise the cash ourselves, so we grabbed a lead pipe, went down by the docks, tried to roll a drunk and like as not wound up eating pavement for our efforts. Or we submitted to horrifying medical experiments that permanently affected our fine motor skills and our gag reflexes, all for a few bucks so we could buy our crummy barely-bendable action figures that caught fire halfway down our windpipes while we twitched uncontrollably and threw up all over the room, and we liked it. We loved it!

We swear there's a point to all this.

So why are we bringing up how decrepit we are and how Dickens-meets-Tarantino our childhoods happened to be? Sour grapes, mostly. See, faithful viewer Ben Hur forwarded us an article from this week's Newsweek about how parents today have too much cash and absolutely no ability whatsoever to say no to their kids-- to the degree that the first mom mentioned in the article was "struggling" to hold the line and not buy her 9-year-old son the latest little toy he wanted: an iPod mini.

That's right, a 9-year-old kid. And while it might not be odd that he'd ask for a miniPod, it strikes us as 33 flavors of skullwhack that his mom is having trouble saying no. Oh, sure, our moms would have a tough time saying no to that request, too, but only because they'd be laughing so hard. And get this: in the end, this woman finally did agree to blow $249 on a miniPod for her precious third-grader, although the poor little tyke had to forfeit his birthday party to get it.

Now, about that point we promised-- you thought it was just going to be about how iPods are so hot, even 9-year-olds want them, right? Nope, although that's apparently all too true. To see where we're going with this, you need to know why the aforementioned miniPod-buying mom finally caved and dropped a quarter-grand on a sophisticated piece of audio electronics for her little kid: apparently he told her that "everyone has one"... and when she called a bunch of other moms in her neighborhood to ask, she found out that he was right.

Believe it, kiddies: there's at least one suburban New York neighborhood out there where all the third-graders are running around listening to miniPods that their parents bought them. So, again, a little off-topic jealousy-- aaaarrrrggghhh-- and then comes the startling revelation that we had to share with you: hard drives, shmard drives; the reason that miniPods have been so scarce for the past eight months is because they've all been bought up and given to whining 9-year olds.

Now, given that oh-so-simple explanation for one of Apple's worst product shortages, we here at AtAT did a little digging to find out if maybe the company's other recent and ongoing shortfalls might simply be due to overwhelming demand among unanticipated demographics. What we found may shock you: most infants under the age of 18 months have high-end Power Macs next to their cribs, there's nary a dachshund on this continent that isn't packin' an Xserve G5, and those "late" 30-inch Cinema Displays are actually all shipping to department store mannequins. Who knew?