Heartbeat... slowing... Vision... fading... Must... have... drama... Honestly, we're not sure how many more slow news days we can take. Generally speaking, we're a gentle and peace-loving group down here at the AtAT compound, but for cryin' out Pete's sake, people, is one little failed assassination attempt too much to ask for? Nothing permanently disabling, or anything like that; just a scratch, a flesh wound-- maybe Phil Schiller's arm in a sling for a couple of weeks. He's a hardy fella, he can take it. Besides, chicks dig scars. Because if something interesting doesn't shake up the Apple world soon, we're going to have to resort to claiming that typos in Apple marketing mailings point to imminent product releases. (Faithful viewer Andrew Allen points out that the ALT tag for one of the iBook G4 graphics in the latest edition of eNews refers to an "iBook G5"-- clearly it'll ship any day now!)

In the meantime, we're reduced to commenting on the product ratings that have started popping up at the online Apple Store in the past several days. Originally we only noticed them on Apple's own products: "Apple ratings" of one to five Apples-- or should we say, five to five Apples, since every single Apple product had a perfect five-Apple rating. Clicking the "What is this?" link underneath the rating popped up the cutesy explanation that "we give all Apple products a rating of '5 Apples' because we think they're great. Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products? We didn't think so." Har de har har. We can't say for sure, of course, but the whole "Apple rating" thing looks like the work of a web developer who stayed up all night and then took prescription allergy medication on an empty stomach.

According to CNET, though, Apple has cut most of the cutesy explanation from its site, and has also started posting real ratings on the third party equipment it sells-- ratings based on customer-submitted reviews. So if you own, say, a Griffin iTrip and you love it to pieces and back again, you can inform others of your positive product experience by leaving a gushing review at the Apple Store; Apple will spend five business days (yeesh, it's easier to buy a handgun) thoroughly examining every character of your submission to ensure that its content is not "illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable, and does not consist of or contain political campaigning or commercial solicitation." Assuming it's completely benign in every conceivable legal sense, Apple will post your review and average in your rating of one to five stars.

No, it's not an earth-shattering new feature or anything, but it can be helpful; there are a zillion FM transmitters from which to choose, for example, and it's nice to see at a glance which ones are getting the thumbs-up from the community. True, the lack of real ratings of Apple's own gear just smacks of deep-seated self-esteem issues, but still, it's a handy improvement. Consider it the next big step in the Amazonification of the Apple Store; One-Click shopping was Phase 1, these customer reviews are Phase 2, and hopefully Phase 3 will involve the Apple Store finally accepting AtAT as an affiliate site like Amazon did instead of rejecting us as "unfit." (Until that happens, guess where we'd rather you spend your money?)