A Nightmare Before Xmas (12/24/03)
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Christmas Eve! Tonight's the night you're supposed to drift peacefully off to sleep while visions of sugar plums dance in your heads so a fat guy with a sack can break into your house, swipe those cookies you were keeping on the mantelpiece, and maybe leave some gifts under your tree as a compulsive act stemming from some sort of deep-seated psychological complex. It really is a magical time of year!

But what if you don't want visions of sugar plums dancing in your head? What if sugar plums kinda make you sick? Or what if, more likely, you have no freakin' idea what sugar plums are in the first place, and therefore you don't want them cluttering up your dreamscape? Well, good news, folks! The playful Grinches at CNN/Money have just the thing for you: a hypothetical business scenario so unspeakably awful that you'll have night terrors for weeks. Take that, sugar plums!

Without further ado, here's the goods: columnist Paul R. La Monica wants to see Motorola buy Apple.

Motorola. Apple, owned by Motorola.

The future of the Mac, determined by-- yes, you heard correctly-- Motorola.

Geesh, forget about nightmares; we may never sleep again.

La Monica's take on it is that Apple would then get a chance to do for mobile phones what the iPod did for the world of digital music. Fair enough. He also notes that Motorola is trying to spin off its chipmaking business, after which it'll be a consumer electronics company churning out phones, flat-screen TVs, DVD players, and cable set-top boxes-- all stuff that could conceivably benefit greatly from Apple's consumeriffic design skills. That all makes perfect sense, we suppose, although most of this sounds like it'd come off better if Apple bought Motorola, instead. (Heck, if Apple waits a few more quarters, maybe it'll even be in a position to do just that.)

Notice that La Monica never once mentions the Mac. Our take on it, of course, is that if Motorola bought Apple, Power Macs would go back to G4s, all Macs would be perennially backordered by six or eight weeks at best, Mac fans could go back to looking forward to 50 MHz performance boosts every eighteen months, and we'd all wind up committing mass suicide-- probably by clubbing ourselves to death with old Motorola StarMaxes.

La Monica, to his credit, isn't proposing that such a buyout is likely, possible, or even desirable ("Apple is NEVER going to sell out... it would be a sin if the company did")-- he's just playing What If. It's just that where he sees golden opportunities for Motorola's consumer goods, we see a fate worse than death for the Mac. And Mac users. But hey, it sure gets rid of those pesky sugar plums, doesn't it?


 
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From the writer/creator of AtAT, a Pandemic Dad Joke taken WAYYYYYY too far


 

The above scene was taken from the 12/24/03 episode:

December 24, 2003: Analysts are saying that Apple has to get on the stick and compete with Media Center PCs; time to bring back the Mac TV! Meanwhile, a CNN/Money columnist gives us all the heebie-jeebies by proposing that Motorola buy Apple, and Apple launches a quiet trade-in deal allowing owners of older PowerBook G4s to get $700 off a brand new model...

Other scenes from that episode:

  • 4410: A Case Of The "Sposedtas" (12/24/03)   Why, lookee here-- BBC News is reporting that iPods are so popular in the UK that "demand is certainly outstripping supply" and stores are "selling them almost as fast as they come in." For anyone who still doesn't get why Apple is waiting until after the holiday shopping season to introduce new lower-cost iPods, we've officially done all we can to help you, short of beating you about the head and shoulders with two sticks on which we've written the words "SUPPLY" and "DEMAND."...

  • 4412: A Trade-In To Trade Up (12/24/03)   Christmas Eve is just about over down here at the AtAT compound, folks, so we've got to clear off soon to make room for the jolly fat guy, just in case he's bringing us new iPods or something. But we've got to pass on just one last quick little present to the PowerBook owners out there before we go drench ourselves in nog; got an older PowerBook G4 that's showing its age?...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...

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