It's been a long-standing problem for Apple: no matter how short a leash Steve keeps on his own employees, he's got considerably less control over the blabbing habits of the third party companies on which Apple relies. Take, for instance, the leaked "Kihei" photos (allegedly swiped from the firm who worked on Apple's marketing pieces) which revealed the Autumn 1999 iMac days before Steve planned to spring the surprise. Consider also the way in which graphics chip provider ATI accidentally spilled the beans about new iMacs and Power Macs just before the 2000 Stevenote in New York. What does a guy need to do to get a secret kept around here?

Of course, loose lips among Apple's partners is one of the foundations upon which the entire Mac rumors cosmology is based, and so, for drama's sake, we're certainly not about to start complaining now. Thank heaven, then, for the Economic Daily News. According to a Bloomberg article forwarded to us by faithful viewer skuski, that newspaper reported that Quanta, a Taiwanese manufacturer of notebook computers, just got an order from Apple to crank out "more than a million iMacs a year starting in the first quarter of 2002." That interesting little factoid meshes rather well with the recent analyst murmurings of "component orders for producing 100,000 15-inch flat-panel iMacs per month, starting in January."

It's worth mentioning, however, that no source is given for the news of the Quanta order (not even those omnipresent "sources close to Apple"), and leaked Apple-related info from Taiwanese manufacturing firms hasn't always been 100% Grade-A accurate. That said, the Economic Daily News included other details that are starting to sound awfully familiar to anyone who's been following the latest iMac frenzy: reportedly the new iMac will boast a "15-inch liquid crystal display" and it'll be introduced next month in San Francisco by His Steveness himself.

It sure looks like this whole Quanta spiel snaps together pretty well with the buzz in the rumor mill, as well as with what some little birds have been singing around the AtAT compound for the past week or so: namely, that the long-awaited LCD iMacs are absitively posolutely going to surface at the shindig in January. Personally, we had been thinking that Apple would rather wait until March so the company could time the new iMac's release with the completed transition to Mac OS X, but at this point we're going to have to concede that January's looking pretty darn likely now. So if you've been saving those pennies, start saving 'em faster...

Most Mac users concerned with Microsoft antitrust issues lately have been focusing on how the company proposes to settle a bunch of private lawsuits by donating a ton of free software to schools-- and you're right to be concerned, because a move like that could sweep Apple clean out of the education market while breeding a new generation of Borg-assimilated computer users who think style, attention to detail, and decent human interface are all prohibited by law. The only scarier future we can imagine is one in which the entire planet is ruled by talking apes... and given Steve Ballmer's rather dubious evolutionary status, the latter may well spring from the former.

However, while the private antitrust settlement proposal is pretty key right now, don't forget about "Redmond Justice"! Yes, the feds caved in and settled the case, as did half of the states who were in on the suit, but there are still nine states sticking it out and demanding a harsher penalty for Microsoft than a slap on the wrist. The good news is that those states have finally pieced together their plan, and as reported in a Wall Street Journal article pointed out by faithful viewer Mike Dini, Apple may stand to benefit directly from the proposal. Apparently one of the terms is that Microsoft keep developing Mac versions of Office, a potentially important demand because the original five-year Apple-Microsoft agreement which stipulated the continuation of Office for the Mac just happens to expire in August.

So if this proposed remedy plan goes through, those of you who like Office can look forward to many more years of upgrades; personally, we suspect that Microsoft would continue releasing new Mac versions of Office regardless, because by all accounts the company makes some pretty good money off of us Mac users. Personally, we think that's the least significant clause in the states' remedy plan; the requirement that Microsoft ship a Linux version of Office stands to shake things up a bit more. And let's not forget the stipulations that Microsoft open-source Internet Explorer, make available a version of Windows without bundled applications, and put a fully-compliant version of Java back into Windows XP. Heck, it's no breakup, but it's a lot more interesting than the "we promise we'll behave from now on" settlement that the Justice Department accepted.

Microsoft will soon have a chance to argue against these remedies, and you can expect them to argue hard-- especially since, according to a CNET article sent to us by faithful viewer chollyhead, the proposed penalty should Microsoft fail to comply with the remedies is the forced open-sourcing of Windows itself. Yowza! As one antitrust lawyer puts it, "It's inconceivable to me that Microsoft would agree to that unless and until it had lost in the trial court, lost in the Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court had denied an appeal, and the sun and the moon were properly aligned." Well, let's see, here... Microsoft did lose in trial court, it did lose in the Appeals Court, and the Supreme Court did refuse to hear the case. So, come on, sun and moon!

Earlier this year, one county in Virginia suddenly found itself the focus of the Mac community's attention when it announced its plan to lease 23,000 iBooks for its public school students. At the time, the superintendent stated that the project would bring students a "vibrant, engaged-type of learning," and we at AtAT wondered what exactly he meant by that. As it turns out, "vibrant" was a pretty appropriate adjective for the kind of learning going on, although we imagine that "pulse-pounding," "mouth-watering," and "sizzling hot" may have been even more apt descriptions. Yes, this holiday season, some of the iBook-enabled students in Henrico County have visions of something dancing in their heads, all right-- but those aren't sugar plums.

See, faithful viewer (and fabulous babe) Helen alerted us to an Associated Press article about those naughty high school kids and the iBooks that were accessories to the crime. It seems that "graphic sexual images" have been found on "dozens" of iBooks so far, with over fifty students having been suspended or worse for "using the hardware to access porn." More accurately, we'd have said those students are being disciplined for lacking the good sense to hide said porn, but it's a subtle distinction nonetheless. And while we'd consider a Henrico County high school porn-fiend ratio of just 0.5% (an estimated sixty students out of 11,800) to be impressively low, some people are still understandably upset.

"Don't these schools have filtering software?" you ask. Well, yes, they claim to have a package that's "one of the best... on the market," but as everyone knows, that isn't saying much. It's a well-known fundamental law of the universe that technology can never advance quickly enough to keep teenagers from looking at pictures of nekkid people. Nevertheless, Henrico County is game to try, and expects to install "security features to make it more difficult for students to download porn" when the iBooks are collected for a RAM upgrade over the upcoming holiday vacation. Doubtless those "security features" will soon be thwarted by the ingenuity born of the adolescent need for filth, the extra RAM will allow the iBooks to download and display even more sophisticated forms of smut (say, video instead of still pictures), and the world will continue turning on its axis just as it has for millennia. Such is life.

The only thing we're wondering is whether Apple is miffed that the iBook is mentioned by name in the article as the instrument of porn acquisition, or if it's more upset that the name "iBook" is mentioned only once. After all, there's no such thing as bad publicity, and if the iBook becomes associated with easily-downloaded Internet pornography, why, just think how sales would skyrocket. Imagine the ad campaign!