Whoa, way to miss a forecast! It's one thing to promise a product release a full year in advance and fail to deliver due to technical hurdles tripping up a third-party supplier; sure, we were all disappointed when Uncle Steve's "3 GHz within a year" promise fell over and caught fire, but we all understood: after all, it was IBM who couldn't hack the 90-nanometer thing, which was hardly Apple's fault, and at least Apple had the decency to tell us that it wasn't going to hit Steve's target date a full three weeks before the deadline arrived. That's all totally reasonable, in our book. But c'mon, folks-- what's with the Canadian launch of the iTunes Music Store?

As you no doubt recall, Apple promised a Canadian iTMS rollout in November, and it certainly didn't make that promise a whole year in advance; we remember it like it was yesterday, because it practically was yesterday-- it happened just five weeks ago, on October 26th. But by our calendar (which just happens to be Apple's, too), it's now officially December, and as faithful viewer littlemisspixelpants confirms, north of the border, the iTMS is still nowhere to be seen. When a company misses a one-month launch window that it publicly sets for itself five weeks before the window closes, you have to assume that something went really, really wrong.

What's especially interesting about the iTMS November no-show (well, interesting to us, anyway-- the Canadians probably just find it galling) is that just a few days ago, Apple was still insisting that a November launch was guaranteed. See, the Canucks get Thanksgiving out of the way back in early October, so this past Thursday, while the AtAT staff was attempting to achieve a profound state of mashed potato-induced hibernation, the Globe and Mail was busy confirming with Apple that the iTMS would still spread north in November. Company spokesperson Natalie Kerris was quoted as saying "it's still November; we'll launch in November." Except, of course, that it's now no longer November, and needless to say, they didn't.

So what happened? It's just conjecture, but we expect some sort of last-minute licensing snafu (yes, just like the Irish one) is the likeliest explanation for the delay, since it's always been licensing issues and not technical ones holding iTMS launches back. Plus, AppleInsider reports that Apple's been running iTMS TV commercials up north since "the third week of November," which certainly implies that Apple's been good to go for at least that long and fully expected to be able to flip the switch. Indeed, we're sure that Apple isn't crazy about having blown the cash to run TV ads "in heavy rotation" for the past couple of weeks without an actual service up and running to separate viewers from their money.

Here's hoping that, whatever the disagreement might be, it gets hammered out quickly, because right now literally dozens of Canadians are beginning to think that Steve Jobs and his spokespeople are a pack of dirty, dirty liars. Hey, wait a minute-- Apple said it would "launch the iTunes Music Store in Canada in November." But did it ever specify which year? Hmmmm, we don't like where this is going...