When it comes to foretelling the advent of upcoming Macs, longtime viewers know that the AtAT staff has dabbled in the art of precognition in the past, and often with great success. But we're the first to admit that lately we've been loath to don our Prognosticator Hats™ ($24.95, L.L.Bean), for three very important reasons. The first is our concern that messing with the black arts will bring us to ruin, just like Willow on Buffy. (Yes, we take all our moral cues from television. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.) Secondly, the price of soy-based artificial goat entrails has gone through the roof in the past few months, making vegan hieroscopy an expensive hobby. Lastly, and most importantly of all, we really just don't have the time; we're far too busy keeping up with TiVo and the boundless stream of wisdom it imparts.

But in a classic illustration of that age-old maxim "use it or lose it," it appears that we've lost whatever connection we may have once had with the Great Beyond. See, this whole business with Apple rescheduling Steve's Expo keynote to fall a day before the show floor opens made us a tad curious, so we reached for the Ouija board and tried to contact the spirit realm for a few hints about what Sneaky Steve has up his sleeve. But whatever ghost grabbed hold of our little scrying-glass doohickey apparently thought it'd be fun to mess with our heads a bit. (We suspect it was Casper, in a rare snit over that whole used-to-be-Richie-Rich thing.)

See, when we asked it which Mac products would be revised in just over three weeks' time, that stupid Ouija thing pumped out "ALL OF THEM." This, you can imagine, we regarded with extreme skepticism; while any Mac enthusiast with at least three-quarters of a brainstem is fully primed for new iMacs (presumably the long-awaited and long-overdue LCD-based model) and the smart money is also on new Power Macs as well (fast G4s if you're cautiously optimistic, G5s if you're the type who also routinely buys magazine subscriptions to increase your chances of winning the giant check from Ed McMahon), everybody knows that the PowerBook and iBook were each just tuned up a mere two months ago.

Doubting the Ouija's prediction of a three-month product cycle for Apple's portables, we asked it again-- but once again, the darn fool thing insisted that every single Mac on the product grid will be at least tweaked in three weeks' time. We suppose it's possible-- maybe Apple finally found a slot-loading combo drive to stick in the TiBook, and the iBook is getting a slightly bigger screen or something, assuming Apple could cram one into the same enclosure. We asked the spirit for details, but all we got was something about never having had the courage to tell Little Dot how he felt about her.

Until we get something more concrete than some weepy little ghost making vague references to massive and sweeping product revisions, we'll file this one under "Believe It When We See It." Although, come to think of it, an unprecedented full product line-up overhaul does mesh rather nicely with the extra hour tacked onto the Stevenote, as well as the plan to admit press to Apple's booth the day before the riff-raff are allowed in. Hmmm... why do we suddenly have the urge to buy a ton of magazines from the Publishers' Clearing House?

Congratulations are in order for Apple's fearless leader! He's been called a lot of things over the years (a great many of which we can't repeat here, seeing as this is a family show), but this is the first time we've heard Steve Jobs referred to as a "Fascinating Tycoon." That's right, ladies and germs; Forbes has published its list of fifteen personalities it designates as the "irresistible rich," and Steve ranked a spot at that elite table. You can bet that the celebratory Evian will be flowing freely in Cupertino tonight.

However, we should probably mention that not all Fascinating Tycoons are equally fascinating. Indeed, Steve only ranks eighth on the list-- smack in the middle. That's not at all bad when you consider that he beat out such slightly-less-fascinating individuals as Ted Turner, Donald Trump, George Lucas, and even his own best buddy Larry Ellison; we consider it a bit of a snub, though, to discover that Forbes apparently finds Steve less fascinating than Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Bill Gates.

Okay, Spielberg, maybe; Oprah, perhaps. But Bill Gates "fascinating"? And, more to the point, more fascinating than not just Steve, but Spielberg and Oprah besides? Okay, yeah, the man's haircut attracts stares the same way a flaming car wreck does, but if road-accident-style rubbernecking is Forbes's measure of "fascination," then we suspect there's a bit of a misnomer going on here.

After we managed to swallow our indignation into a hard little ball to be released inappropriately in public at some dark future time, we took a look at the methodology Forbes used to calculate how fascinating people are. Suddenly it all comes clear: apparently the rankings were scientifically determined by factoring in how many times each individual was mentioned in books, on the Web, in the press, and on the radio and TV. Given Mr. Gates's ongoing tangle with the feds (and Uncle Steve's relative inexperience at violating antitrust law), by that measure, we certainly concede that Bill is more "fascinating"-- judging by his rap sheet and his haircut. But really, what else matters?

Wake the kids and phone the neighbors: faithful viewer rabow informs us that there's a new iTunes riding into town. Apparently everyone's favorite digital music application is now at version 2.0.3, available via a quick trip to Software Update in Mac OS X or the iTunes download page for either the X or 9 version. Those of you who haven't been rendered completely paranoid ever since that whole "iTunes 2 Ate My Hard Drive" brouhaha have probably already raced on over and snagged the update. (Personally, we'll wait a day or two just in case.)

So far there are no reports of dramatic data loss suffered by reckless iTunes junkies over at MacFixIt, so that's a good sign, at least. And MacFixit also clues us in to 2.0.3's new features: along with the ever-popular "improved stability and performance," this latest version can fix "improperly encoded Unicode tags" and adds support for SONICblue's Rio One MP3 device. On a side note, not that we're implying causality, here, but the Rio One's design reminds us just a little bit of the iPod's. (Our favorite part of the description, though, is that it "now comes with a fast USB connection." Then again, with a maximum storage capacity of 160 MB, we suppose that USB is plenty fast enough.)

But it's those of you with an honest-to-goodness iPod that are really going to dig iTunes 2.0.3-- especially if your digital music collections exceed the iPod's 5 GB hard drive. Previously that fact would mean you'd have to update the songs on your iPod manually, because the automatic synchronization feature bailed if iTunes couldn't fit all your songs on the iPod at once. Now, though, iTunes 2.0.3 apparently comes with a new option to transfer "only the checked songs in your library and playlists to your iPod." So those of you with 80 GB of MP3s, rejoice; managing your iPod just got a little bit easier.

For what it's worth, we'd be remiss not to mention that at least a couple of readers over at MacNN have reported scary weirdness after trying to update to 2.0.3, including kernel panics and unbootable Macs. On the plus side, the vast majority of people seem to have zero troubles, and call 2.0.3's performance "snappier," especially when it comes to the Visuals. So back up your data, summon that courage, and do what you gotta do.