Employee malfeasance and underwear gnome schemes cannot account for the nationwide shortage of retail iPhone availability. As many TUAW readers discovered to their delight, AT&T has been clearing out their refurb iPhone stock and Apple stores are short on the shelves. As Apple's supply chain is almost certainly unimpaired, pundits can only conclude that we're about ready to hit an iPhone refresh.
The question about the refresh isn't whether it will happen or not but rather when. We were guessing June/WWDC for a 3G iPhone announcement and September for a delivery -- after all, new cell equipment has to go through rigorous approval. Stock shortages indicate that at least a memory-based refresh might arrive sooner than later. Right now, Apple customers are experiencing 5-7 day shipment delays on their purchases.
Perhaps the most interesting and mysterious two words heard yesterday during Apple's big conference call were "product transition." The biggest surprise of the call was that Apple was setting its profit guidance much lower than expected, and the two big causes they gave for doing that were "higher commodity costs" (because they believe they got a good deal on iPhone components this quarter) and these mysterious "product transitions." So what's the deal there?
Is the Mac Mini doomed? According to 
