Well, folks, as you've no doubt noticed, the long-awaited date of March 23rd has come and gone, with nary a new Power Mac G5 to show for it-- a fact that has led legions of true believers in the International 3/23 Cult to throw themselves under buses in disappointment. (The cult members are fine; the buses were parked at the time. They weren't that disappointed.) Now most Mac fans jonesing for a 2.5ish GHz fix are placing their fragile hopes on the widely-speculated "March 26th-esque" date instead, which, of course, covers everything from today through Tuesday the 30th-- and if speed-bumped Power Macs aren't announced by then, there are going to be an awful lot of devastated fans sticking their heads into ovens. Electric ones, sure, and turned off, but hey-- it's dark in there.

Then again, it's not like the day was a total wash-out on the G5 front; Apple did at least issue a press release to announce that it's finally started shipping the Xserve G5 as of today. If you're not up on the saga, Apple waited a full six months after the G5's coming out party before announcing that the chip was finally going into the Xserve, and promised that Xserve G5s would ship in February. One week into an Xserveless March, the company admitted that there was a delay, but assured us all that it was "working hard" to ship the new servers this month. Well, the good news is that all that hard work paid off, and the first Xserve G5s are finally winging their big, flat ways to customers the world over. Well, some of them, anyway. So far, it's actually only the single-processor Xserve G5s that are getting shipped, and Apple reports that the dual-processor models won't roll off the lines until next month. Still, progress is progress.

Now, even if you could hardly care less about the availability of a $3000 server that gets screwed into a rack, it's worth repeating that the new Xserves use the very same PowerPC 970FX G5 processor that's expected to purr away inside the speed-bumped Power Macs. So if anything, Apple's Xserve news proves that the chips exist in a shipping form (although the continuing absence of dual-processor models doesn't say great things about processor availability), and should give hope to any impatient potential Power Mac customers who had all but given up. Hang in there, fellas-- they're coming any day now, we swear!

Just keep in mind that "any day" doesn't necessarily mean "any day this week." Because, see, about that whole March 26th thing... we'd be remiss not to point out that Mac OS Rumors, at least, isn't expecting new Power Macs to surface until the big NAB conference commencing on April 17th (during which Apple has scheduled a "special event"), or possibly just before. And if you put a lot of stock in hardware release schedules tied to the ends of potentially inventory-clearing promotion periods, faithful viewer David Wilson notes the existence of a UK extra RAM promo involving Power Macs that runs through-- are you ready for this?-- May 8th.

Why, the very notion of new Power Macs still being a month and a half away makes us want to leap screaming out the window. A first floor window, true, and onto a big pile of squishy pillows, but still, that's a lot more physical exertion than we're used to, and we could well pull a muscle or something in the process and be slightly uncomfortable for days. Talk about acts of desperation.

Is it just us, or didn't Apple originally tell its third party resellers that the Apple retail stores would stay out of the service game completely? Because we're pretty sure that when the first few stores opened, when approached by customers who needed repair work done, the staff informed them that hardware service wasn't performed on the premises and even directed them to local Apple Specialists. Assuming we're not remembering some false memory that arose in a state of hallucinatory sleep deprivation, things have quite clearly changed a lot over the past couple of years, because these days it seems like the Apple retail stores can take your Mac into the back room and do just about anything to it short of rotating its tires and rebuilding its carburetor. And that, of course, is just one more reason for the third-party service providers to be miffed.

Well, folks, Apple isn't planning on ditching retail service anytime soon-- and, in fact, the company is allegedly poised to take things to an even higher level. AppleInsider reports that, as of April 1st, the joke is once again on the third-party resellers, because the Apple retail stores will gain yet another way to swipe as many customers as possible: a rebranded AppleCare service package that will come free with every Mac-- as long as it's purchased from an Apple retail store. Apple "Standard" service reportedly will consist of everything that is currently bundled in the "Mac Pac" service solution (which, seeing as we're woefully out of touch these days, we'd never even heard of), including in-store registration, installation of any additional RAM, AirPort cards, and purchased third-party software, Internet and AirPort Base Station set-up, connection and configuration of any peripherals, etc. And whereas Mac Pac used to be available only to purchasers who opted to buy an AppleCare Protection Plan with their new Macs, the new Standard service will apply to any Mac bought at an Apple retail store.

But wait, there's more: if you want an even higher level of service, you can opt for ProCare, a new package that, for $99 per year, gets you "a 'snazzy' Apple ProCare membership card imprinted with [a] personal ProCare membership number"! And as if that weren't enough, ProCare members get all sorts of nifty benefits, such as "Rapid Repair" services (cut in line and make the proles wait while your Mac gets fixed first), exclusive discounts, access to ""on-demand, free custom workshops and presentations," and-- best of all-- "Advance Genius Bar Reservations." So if there's a hottie Mac Genius working at your local store, it may be time to think about shelling out for ProCare, just so you can schedule reservations with "the Apple Store Genius of [your] choice" via any web browser. Why, it's the closest thing to a legal Internet booty call you're going to find. Well, at least in a retail sense.

By the way, in the spirit of making its retail stores into what Think Secret calls "the techno-equivalent of the neighborhood bar," reportedly Apple has also decided that advice should be free, and therefore plans to "eliminate the consultation fee" for talking with a Mac Genius." (Meanwhile, we didn't even know that Apple had started charging for Genius access in the first place. Hey, we said we were out of touch, didn't we?)

So there you have it: so much for no service at the Apple retail stores; now there's going to be so much service spilling out of there, your shoes will get soaked just walking past. And if Apple manages to advertise these new services so that Joe Average realizes that if he buys a Mac he's going to get personalized help configuring his system to work the way he wants it right out of the box without all that tedious fiddling around with software installations and network setup, the company stands a good chance of drawing a lot more attention from folks who might otherwise never give it a second thought. Provided Apple can survive the contract hits paid for by the third-party resellers, that is...

And the Downloadable Music Wars just keep dragging along. The latest challenger to the iTunes Music Store's throne comes from Wal-Mart, who, according to Reuters, just rolled out its new download service today. Unsurprisingly, it looks pretty much like just about every other non-iTMS service out there: Windows-only, Window Media-based, a 300,000 song catalog, yadda yadda yadda-- we're at the point now where we'd swear they were all created by some insane God of Music Services who ran amuck with a cookie cutter. But that's not to say that Wal-Mart's store doesn't have a differentiating gimmick: its store competes on price, and undercuts the iTMS by (gasp!) eleven cents per song. And that's not all: album downloads are 55 cents cheaper. Why, at our current rate of purchase, switching to Wal-Mart would save us almost enough to buy a pack or two of Juicy Fruit every month or so! Quick, help us trash our Macs and iPods and buy Wintels and Nomads so we can take advantage of these miraculous cost savings!

It's official: we've gotten to the point where we just can't see any of these competing services as even a vague threat to Apple's dominance anymore (eleven-cent discount notwithstanding), because none of them sells songs that can played on the iPod, which we've decided is-- for now, at least-- the absolute dealbreaker when it comes to a genuine shot at success. Things change, granted, but the iPod is becoming so ingrained in our culture that unsupported WMA-based services like Wal-Mart's are fighting a battle so uphill it's practically upside-down, especially with profit margins on song sales as thin as they are.

And yet, we've still got industry players telling the press that it's the other way around: faithful viewer bo notes a CNET article which reports that RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser just said that "Apple is creating problems for itself by using a file format that forces consumers to buy music from Apple's own iTunes site." Says Glaser, "Apple's (market) share will go down if they continue to do this. The only way to presently put songs on an iPod is to (buy) them from iTunes." (Apparently Rob has never heard of these funny little things called "CDs," which you can buy from several sources and which store songs that can subsequently be encoded and transferred to an iPod. But we understand how hard it is to keep abreast of all the latest tech developments.)

Glaser's prediction is that "customers will say, 'I bought an iPod and can only shop at one store. What is this? The Soviet Union?'" Now, we admit ignorance as to the tenets of Stalinism as applied to the freedom to choose from which store to purchase a downloadable copy of "Theme from 'A Summer Place,'" but it seems to us that iPod sales have been climbing, and there hasn't been much, if any, backlash from the twelve people who actually prefer to buy their tunes from WMA-based services like BuyMusic.com and Napster-- probably because they've since been institutionalized as dangers to themselves and others. Does anyone else think this smacks of desperation, à la Napster's CEO "warning" record label execs to "stay off the Apple platform"?

Then again, now that Wal-Mart's got that eleven-cent discount thing going, there may well be riots in the streets from iPod owners who demand their free packs of gum. Here's hoping that Apple offers a reasonable compromise by letting the other stores license its FairPlay Digital Rights Management system so that they can all ditch Windows Media and sell iPod-compatible protected AACs just like the iTMS does. After all, that completely addresses Rob's concern, right? That oughta make him real happy.