A belated Happy New Year to all our viewers out there, or at least to the ones still sticking around after our extended absence. (Yes, both of you!) We're finally back from our holiday jaunt through the cultural hotbed known as the American Midwest; in fact, we've been back since last Saturday, but unfortunately this particular trip was so rife with calamity (the previously-mentioned stomach flu, a four-hour flight delay, a fire-related hotel evacuation into the Chicago winter at 4:30 AM-- why, the fun never stops at the Play-Doh Fun Factory!) that we needed a few days to re-ensconce ourselves into the cozy confines of the AtAT compound, reel our heads back in from Holiday Limbo, and unpack all the loot that found its way into the possession of AtAT's youngest staff member. (Given that she's the only girl in the family younger than college age, said loot was copious, to say the least. We now own more pink fabric than most professional Barbie impersonators.)

But at last we seem to have achieved something vaguely resembling normalcy, or at least whatever passed for such before our foolhardy trek west. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of catching up to do plot-wise, because Apple-related stuff actually happened over the holidays, albeit largely in a rumor-only capacity. The important stuff, in case you missed it, involves-- what else?-- alleged insider info about the super-secret magic goodies that Uncle Steve plans to conjure forth Wonka-style during next week's heavily anticipated keynote address, amid the inevitable oooohs and aaaahs from the faithful pilgrims assembled before him. Surely you've all heard about all of this by now, but we feel we should mention it anyway, at the very least for continuity's sake, because otherwise we'll never get back on track.

So the big news, of course, was Think Secret's revelation last week that Apple is finally going to bite the bullet and ship a low-low-low-cost entry-entry-entry-level Mac sans integrated display. If the report is accurate (and as we've said before, Think Secret has a pretty solid track record on stuff like this), then Steve is gearing up to unveil a "sub-$500 Mac bomb" next week-- a system that, with a single 1.25 GHz G4, may not win any performance awards, but whose low cost may suck in scads of curious Wintellians so smitten with their iPods that they won't be able to resist dropping $499 on a "headless iMac" to see what happens when iPodian elegance and ease-of-use is applied to a desktop personal computer. True, these people will most likely plug their spiffy new Macs into whatever butt-ugly five-year-old phosphor-burned VGA monitors they happen to have sitting around in their basements (the horror... the horror...), but with luck they'll still absorb enough of the Mac experience to get them to spring for a Power Mac with a Cinema Display next time around.

Heck, some people might even skip the monitor altogether, since AppleInsider claims that the cheapMac will "easily plug into any display or television"-- ah, memories of the good ol' days, when only rich folks plugged their Apple ][s into an actual monitor; the rest of us jacked 'em right into the TV set alongside the Atari 2600. AI also corroborates several of Think Secret's listed cheapMac specs: a low-end G4, 256 MB of RAM, a basic graphics subsystem, and the same ports you'd expect to find on an iBook. And gee, between iLife and the various handy apps that ship with Mac OS X, that's really a whole lot of computer for $499. Especially if it ships with a productivity suite-- you know, like AppleWorks, only preferably one that won't make customers keel over in sheer horror of using software that was last meaningfully updated when big lizards roamed the earth.

Which brings us to the other major Bit o' Honey to dribble out during the holiday sleepiness last week: Think Secret's claim that in a week's time, AppleWorks will be officially replaced with iWork, a suite consisting of Keynote 2 for presentations, an app called "Pages" (which will be at least a word processor and possibly also a spreadsheet), and whatever else Apple sees fit to wedge in there-- hopefully stuff to replace the drawing/painting/database functions in AppleWorks, because as much as we'd love to see that suite replaced with something written since the Battle of Hastings, we'd hope any replacement would have more functionality, not less. But actually, you know what? Never mind. iWork could consist of nothing more than an Apple-rebranded version of SimStapler, and as long as it's newer than AppleWorks, it'll be welcome.

So anyway, that's what we missed while we were gallivanting around flatland yenching uncontrollably and negotiating the twitchy minefield known as Family-- and given that, according to CNET, Apple has just sued Think Secret (more on that tomorrow), we can probably rest assured that at least some of those specs are accurate. Now that we're kindasorta caught up on the major plot elements of the day, we can turn our attention to more current events without feeling like we skipped anything huge. So, uh, just pretend that we covered everything worth mentioning, okay? Because that would really help a lot.