"But AtAT," friends ask, "now that Apple's pretty much back on its feet, whatever shall you do when the drama starts to fade?" Oh, please-- there's more drama coming out of Apple than we know what to do with, and there's no sign of the well running dry anytime soon. Take, for example, Apple Insider's latest report on a time-honored Cupertino tradition: deliberate misinformation campaigns! That's right, Apple's Silicon Curtain of product development secrecy is so important, the company higher-ups have gone to great lengths to plug any holes that might ruin the P1 surprise. To that end, it's now reported that Apple has thrown subtlety and finesse straight out the window and is outright lying to employees in hopes of catching leaks by seeing what incorrect info makes it into the press. Now if that ain't drama, we don't know what is.

It should be noted, however, that Apple's most recent misinformation attempt was reportedly so hamhanded that some employees actually left the room laughing. So the question on our minds is this: was it a poorly executed but genuine attempt to mislead Apple employees in hopes of catching loose lips? Or was it meant to fail, serving as a tacit warning to all that Apple's taking leaks very seriously? Think of it this way... You've got a multibillion-dollar company with the potential to change the world, and you've got lots of genuine talent working for you to make that happen. At the same time, you have to insist on utmost secrecy about your projects, but some of your genuine talent is prone to blab. Now, which would you rather do: fire the talent, or pull a stunt that might make them decide to be a little less chatty? Once word of a misinformation campaign gets out, those genuinely talented people will probably be less likely to spill the beans.

Or, Apple's attempt to plant false specs was just inept and ridiculous. We're not ruling out that possibility-- we just think that if they did want to fool the employees, they'd probably be better at it. In any case, we hope that at least some of the misinformation makes it out our way, because it's probably pretty entertaining. :)

Look, do not get us wrong-- we absolutely love Mac OS 8.6. In fact, we love it more than we loved Mac OS 8.5, which we loved more than 8.1, which we loved a lot more than 8.0, which in turn stole a place in our heart from 7.6, which-- well, you get the point. At any given point in time, the current Mac OS seems to be the pinnacle of elegance and ease of use. In fact, we're going to have to agree with Robert Morgan when he says that the Mac OS interface is Apple's brand. Take it from us-- the Mac OS is more of the Macintosh than the physical Mac is. After all, the only time we're reminded that our Power Tower Pro clone isn't a bona fide Mac is when we have to open the thing up to install RAM or a new hard drive, and we slice open our fingers on the cheap metal case and hurt ourselves trying to cut the covers off the drive bays. But say Apple started selling a blue and white Power Mac G3 running Windows 98. Would that be a Mac? Yeah, right.

Now, as nifty as the current Mac OS is on the outside, it still leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to what's under the hood. Apple's been trying for about a decade now to come up with a more "modern" operating system that really makes Mac hardware shine; while 8.6 is easy to use and a joy to work with, it still doesn't do pre-emptive multitasking, true memory protection, symmetric multiprocessing, modern I/O, and all those other buzzwords. You may think you don't need them, and maybe you don't; after all, we're pretty happy with our Macs' performance as things stand, too. But the bottlenecks in the Mac OS are robbing your Mac of the performance it should rightly be enjoying, and that's where Mac OS X comes in. Its promise is to be as elegant and easy to use as the current Mac OS we all know and love, while having all those great buzzwords that will let you and your Mac perform to your fullest. Fewer crashes. More speed than you ever imagined. Good stuff like that.

Mac OS X is still a ways out (we don't count Mac OS X Server, which has the buzzwords but not the interface), but it's coming. If you want a taste of what's in store, you'll definitely want to check out Mac OS Rumors, which has a fairly detailed report of the latest developer preview release. If you don't think those buzzwords are so important, you should know that performance in some applications was twice as fast under this early build of Mac OS X than under today's Mac OS 8.6. Now that's something to look forward to.

The thing about statistics is this: they carry an inherent authority. When the average person hears that 67% of American college graduates have never owned a cat, he or she will take that information as gospel, because obviously if some poor soul went to all the trouble of being so scientific and painstakingly tabulating data about cat ownership, well, then they must be correct. And there's even more authority imparted when those statistics are presented in graph form, because now that scientific data is even further processed for "normal" people to understand quickly and easily-- so there's this subliminal pressure to accept the data as fact. (Just ask USA Today-- 79% of American movie-goers agree.)

That's why your friendly neighborhood AtAT paranoid conspiracy theorists are generally a little leery when it comes to statistics about Mac purchases; just because the numbers are expressed as percentages and pretty bar graphs doesn't mean that they're telling the truth. Many (if not most) of the time, someone's got an agenda and wants those numbers to tell a particular story. "Redmond Justice" fans, in particular, will recall how Microsoft's final witness, MIT economist Richard Schmalensee ("SCHMALENSEE!!"), brought his own graphs up to the stand to show that Netscape's market share wasn't substantially hindered by Internet Explorer being given away for free-- and government mouthpiece David Boies noticed that two of the graphs actually contradicted each other. Whoops.

So in that vein, we took the graph posted by ZD InfoBeads (which we found via MacInTouch) showing recent trends in Macintosh demographics with a grain of salt. InfoBeads shows that recent Mac buyers are less educated and make less money than Mac buyers of old, which (though it may not sound like it at first) is a good thing. It implies that Apple's appealing to a much broader range of the computer-buying spectrum, which is great in terms of expanding the installed user base. It shows that Macs are no longer only affordable by people pulling down huge salaries. In more ways than one, the iMac is re-establishing the Macintosh as the Computer For The Rest Of Us. But the bad news is that, according to the InfoBeads chart, the percentage of Mac purchasers who are first-time computer buyers actually decreased during the iMac's first seven months on the market, despite Apple's claim that about a third of all iMacs went to first-time buyers.

So are these lies, damn lies, or statistics? In particular, we're trying to understand how about 88% of Mac buyers in the August-February period were second-time buyers who had already owned a Mac, while about 27% of the same group were first-time buyers. Neat trick. But even supposing that the overall picture is correct-- that the percentage of first-time buyers actually went down slightly during the iMac's first seven months-- even that isn't as bad as it first sounds. Remember the pent-up demand for inexpensive Mac replacements? When the iMac was finally released, of course a ton of buyers were existing Mac owners looking to replace their LC's and IIci's. But while the percentage of first-time buyers may have dropped slightly, the overall sales volume was very high, so we'd guess that more first-time buyers were purchasing Macs during the August-February period than at any previous time in recent Mac history. Mind you, that's just a guess, but we figure you'll believe it without questioning. 89% of AtAT viewers do.