Regular viewers with access to a reasonably functional long-term memory (oooh, how we envy you-- do you happen to remember where we left our mittens? The fuzzy red ones with the penguins on them? No? Well, thanks anyway) may recall that, after noticing a Newsweek interview with El Stevo last October in which he talked exclusively about iPods and iTunes and never mentioned the Mac even once, we expressed a vague concern that Apple was focusing a bit too heavily on the music side of the business at the expense of that whole Mac thing. It wasn't a big deal, really; just us boosting the drama ratio, as usual. We got a lot of mail that week accusing us of being paranoid (as if that's a bad thing?) and assuring us that Apple's primary focus would always be the Mac, if for no other reason than its massive contribution to the company's revenues.

Well, not that we were all that serious when we broadcast that scene, but do you suppose Steve will let us borrow his I TOLD YOU SO t-shirt if we ask really nicely and say "pretty please" and maybe give him a sticker? Because faithful viewer mrmgraphics forwarded us a MacMinute blurb which in turn references a Reuters article about how the makers of musical instruments are hoping that GarageBand boosts sales, and in it, Apple veep of applications marketing Rob Schoeben candidly admits that "for us, all of a sudden, music is the No. 1 priority of the company." (Ooooh, you just know that The Beatles' lawyers are writing that one down as evidence.)

That's right, folks: music, Apple's number one priority. No wonder the last Stevenote was two hours of John Mayer and miniPods with nary a new Mac in sight (unless you count the twelve seconds Steve grudgingly set aside for the introduction of the G5 Xserves). The iPod may be a relatively small slice of Apple's revenue pie for now, and the iTunes Music Store may be barely breaking even, but that isn't stopping the company from throwing a whole lotta manpower at the whole music thing in hopes of staying a few dozen hundred thousand steps ahead of the competition. And it's certainly justifiable from a raw numbers standpoint, too; since iTunes is now available for Windows, it's GarageBand that might attract a few Wintellians to the Mac side of the force. So, no complaints from us, as long as the Mac fits squarely into the whole music strategy and doesn't turn into an afterthought. After all, we wouldn't want something like, oh, say, Mac quality control to suffer, right?

By the way, we're getting lots of mixed comments on GarageBand (most of the complaints are from buyers who didn't read the system requirements and don't have a DVD-ROM drive with which to install it), but personally, it rocks our world something fierce. AtAT broadcasts are only going to get even more ridiculously late now that we've discovered that the Arena Rock virtual amp and a looped drum track are roughly equivalent to hooking electrodes directly into the pleasure centers of the brain; in addition to the time suck factor, it's hard to type with bleeding fingers. But hey, that's rock 'n' roll.