To those of you complaining incessantly about our just-ending three-week unannounced hiatus: man, you guys are lightweights! First of all, we mentioned several times over the preceding month or two that pesky real-world circumstances would very likely necessitate occasional extended broadcast blackouts, so if you had been paying attention in the first place, you would have stocked up on bottled water and irony supplements to prepare for the inevitable. Second, any grizzled AtAT veteran worth his/her salt will tell you that you should be able to go three weeks without an AtAT fix without so much as breaking a sweat, given that a few years ago we vanished for eleven weeks straight and easily 60 percent of our regular viewing audience still managed to survive-- heck, half of the survivors even retained their sight and/or the use of at least three major limbs. So, you know, suck it up, soldier.

Besides, it's not like anything on the Apple dramascape ever really changes much, right? Case in point: we leave for three weeks to deal with "personal issues," we poke our heads back into the game just to see what's kicking the ball around, and lo and behold, the story of the day is that the Wall Street Journal is claiming that Apple's about to say sayonara to the PowerPC: "two industry executives with knowledge of recent discussions between the companies said Apple will agree to use Intel chips." Ahhhhh... we're home again!

If you've been a Mac user for longer than about ten minutes, "Apple's Switching to Intel!" is a familiar refrain; analysts and pundits are always citing some source or other saying that the migration is inevitable and imminent. Take Rob Enderle, who said that Apple would switch to Intel chips before 2003 was over-- of course, he may not be the best example, since his batting average as far as Apple-based predictions go is so low that it has to be expressed in scientific notation on most calculators. (And yes, we mightily regret having been off the air when the Xbox 360 was officially unveiled, since Enderle swore up and down that it wouldn't be PowerPC-based, and now Microsoft's own specs sheet says "Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU" in black and white. Yes, we missed it. Don't rub it in.)

That's not to say, of course, that there couldn't be something to the rumors this time around; there's semi-credible evidence that Apple had been in talks with Intel about dropping the PowerPC and climbing into bed with Chipzilla, and only finally stuck with the home team because IBM said "hey, check out this PowerPC 970 thingy we just came up with." Since it was allegedly the promise of the G5-as-Uberchip that kept Apple on the PowerPC hook, and the G5 hasn't performed nearly as well as Apple obviously had hoped it would (it was originally supposed to hit 3 GHz by nearly a year ago, remember?), maybe Apple really is looking to level the hardware playing field by switching to Intel. Sure, it's a logistical nightmare to switch processor architectures with 25 million users in the field, but hey, Apple's done it before; granted, 68k-to-PPC wasn't nearly as much of a leap, but it's the same ballpark. Sorta. If you squint.

The bottom line to us, though, is that switching Macs to Intel chips would give Apple a headache so heinous it'd need an Excedrin the size of Montana to tame it, so it'd only take on the challenge if it were absolutely crystal clear that PowerPC is a dead end. Now that the closest thing Microsoft has to its own line of personal computers has just ditched x86 for PowerPC, does that sound likely? So until we hear it from Apple itself (the WSJ says an announcement may come at next month's WWDC), we're going to categorize this whole thing as one more for the crank file.

Not that we're complaining, mind you; when returning from the outside world, the familiarity of a well-worn Apple rumor is as cozy and inviting as a woolly old sock, so it really helps us feel like we've been here all along. And Wall Street's clueless enough about the whole recurring-Intel-rumors thing that the WSJ talking about Macs with Intel Inside™ was enough to send Apple's stock price up a couple of clams, which is always a welcome development 'round these parts. Yes indeedy, it's good to be back...