So how did you celebrate Apple's 25th birthday yesterday? A three-tiered translucent cake and two hundred of your closest Mac-using friends? A twenty-foot-high bonfire on the front lawn in the shape of a huge flaming "X" visible to planes flying overhead well into the wee hours? A late-night high-speed car chase that led thirteen squad cars on a tear across three states as you tried to shake them by lobbing retail copies of Mac OS X out the sunroof of your MacMobile?

We're guessing, "d. None of the above." You probably spent the day resisting the urge to disembowel the people who kept telling you your shoes were untied ("Huh huh, April Fool!"), and, if you happen to live in an area that observes Daylight Savings Time, trying to deal with the sudden disappearance of an hour off the clock. In fact, the odds are pretty good that you didn't know it was Apple's 25th birthday at all, and right now you're smacking yourself in the head and lunging for your car keys, clinging to a vain hope that Hallmark has a line of cards that can be delivered back in time. But don't beat yourself up about it; it's not necessarily your fault that you forgot.

After all, as the PowerBook Zone points out, Apple kept the event pretty low-key this year. Five years ago there was a lot of hoopla, and the company even released the special commemorative Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh to celebrate the milestone, appropriately enough, with one of Apple's highest price tags ever. But whereas two decades was deemed "a big deal," apparently a quarter-century is no big whoop, because Apple's web site lacks any and all mention of the Big Two-Five. Could Apple be getting age-conscious at the ripe old age of 25?

Perhaps the company is feeling some angst over moving up from the "18 to 24" to the "25 to 39" range when filling out marketing surveys and credit card applications. Maybe it's freaked out that the bag boy at the local supermarket keeps calling it "sir" and is actually younger than the Macintosh itself-- Apple's second computer platform. We imagine that age sensitivity among high-tech companies must be pretty harsh, seeing as the average life span of a computer manufacturer is probably, what, ten years? Fifteen, tops? So maybe that's the answer-- Apple's become a grumpy old computer company. We can't wait for the press release: "You kids today with your flin-flarn 'giga' this and 'dual' that... Back in my day, our processors ran at 1 MHz, we maxed out at 32 KILObytes of RAM, and our computers didn't even come with a case-- and we liked it! We LOVED it!!"