So much for cheap designer knockoffs. Wave buh-bye to the likes of the E-Power and the eOne; according to an Apple press release, the company has "successfully concluded" its litigation against the cloners looking to score some easy cash by copying the iMac's distinctive-- and immensely successful-- look. Until now, Apple had won several preliminary injunctions against the offending companies temporarily barring them from making more of the clones, but the final outcome of those cases was still up in the air. Now, though, Apple's probably dancing a little victory jig. The cases are over-- the defendants caved in the face of the injunctions and have settled, agreeing not to make or sell their iMacalikes any more.

While Daewoo's E-Power (which was to be distributed in the U.S. by Future Power) was never actually sold, to the best of our knowledge, K. K. Sotec's eOne has been available for purchase here in the U.S. (bearing the eMachines brand) for quite some time now. And it's been all the more galling to see the translucent blue and white eOne on display at the local Micro Center knowing that eMachines is actually beating Apple in the retail sales standings these days; that fact's been casting an icy pall over our otherwise sunny demeanor. According to a Reuters story, though, those eOnes won't be uglifying store shelves for much longer. Reportedly eMachines has agreed to "stop selling the current version of its eOne computers by March 31st." After that date, Apple will once again be cornering the market on translucent blue and white all-in-one computers, and all will be right with the world.

Note that under the terms of the settlement, Apple's allowed eMachines to market a future system bearing the "eOne" name. Now that Apple's successful court cases have placed its distinctive industrial designs strictly in the "copy this and get your butt sued" category, we can't help but wonder what sorts of designs the PC manufacturers will come up with on their own. Without the iMac as a viable template, we're anticipating some truly startling-looking attempts to cash in on the translucence/bright colors trend. Some manufacturers should probably consider sticking with beige...

Old board members never die, they just don't run for re-election. We heard a few weeks back that Apple board member Ed Woolard would be stepping down this spring, and it came as a mild shock; Woolard's the last of the "Old Guard," the only one left on the board whose membership (barely) predates the Great Steve Return of 1997. So while we weren't exactly skeptical of the news at the time, we figured we'd wait for the official word before trying to determine just what it meant. Well, the official word has come; according to ZDNet News, Apple's latest proxy statement confirms that Woolard will be leaving the board after the shareholders' meeting next month.

Reportedly the board has no plans to fill Woolard's vacant seat. With Woolard gone, that'll leave just six members on Apple's board: Jobs himself, his sidekick Larry Ellison, Bill Campbell of Intuit, Gareth Chang of STAR TV, Jerry York of Micro Warehouse, and Mickey Drexler of the Gap. Every single one of those members was appointed during the Second Jobs Dynasty, which means that the last phase of the takeover is now complete. We wouldn't go so far as to call the board a puppet regime, but the remaining members do remind us a bit of a Jobs cheerleading squad. "Give us an 'S'!"

Now, there are lots of ways to interpret Woolard's departure. We've heard rumors that Woolard wasn't happy with the compensation given to Apple directors, so maybe he left out of frustration after not being able to sway the rest of the board away from Steve's vision, but that's pure, grade-A 100% speculation. Even juicier would be the possibility of some serious bad blood between him and Jobs, but that hardly seems likely; according to the LA Times, Woolard was the one who made the suggestion to give Steve the Gulfstream jet. No, we figure this is an amicable departure by a guy who figures he's got enough on his plate. Woolard's also on the boards of two other heavy-hitting companies-- DuPont and Citigroup-- and some might see his retirement as DuPont's chairman back in 1997 as a sign that he's intentionally slowing down. Maybe serving on the board at Apple was taking up just a bit more of his time than he was comfortable giving. Okay, so it's not exactly melodramatic; sadly, not every decision in the Apple world is motivated by greed, lust, blackmail, or world domination. We'll have to tag this one as an anomaly.

Boy, Michael Dell's obsession with copying Apple just keeps getting scarier. We probably don't need to recite the laundry list of copycat moves Dell has made in the past couple of years, but we'll mention a few just to get the newbies up to speed: the WebPC (comes in different colors, low-cost, targets "hip" consumers who want to surf the 'net just like the iMac). The Inspiron 3x00 laptop (comes in different colors, a consumer portable like the iBook). The focus on wireless networking options, right after AirPort was making waves. And then there's the truly frightening things, like Dell issuing an earnings warning right after Apple did. It's just not healthy.

It's time to add another item to the list of stalkeresque behavior; Dell's copying Apple's bugs, too. You know about the infamous iBook hard disk corruption bug, right? Basically, an inordinate number of iBook owners are finding their systems unbootable, particularly after trying to wake them from sleep mode. You can read all about this worrisome syndrome at MacInTouch; Apple's keeping pretty quiet about it, from what we can tell. If any of you out there are iBook users, turn off the "Preserve Memory Contents" feature in the Energy Saver control panel if you ever turned it on; this seems to be triggering the problem. (For what it's worth, the AtAT iBook has never had that feature enabled, and has never encountered the problem.)

Well, Dell wasn't about to be outdone; faithful viewer Marc Blaydoe was kind enough to point out a ZDNet article discussing recent memory bugs with Dell's laptops, too. Apparently some Dell Latitude and Inspiron notebooks are crashing hard when they're woken up from slee-- er, suspend mode. But rather than copy Apple's bug completely, they put their own spin on things: the problem involves bad RAM instead of a corruption when saving RAM contents to disk. And in another departure from Apple's footsteps, Dell has actually acknowledged the problem publicly. They've posted a diagnostic tool to determine whether or not a laptop is affected, and they're even fixing afflicted systems. Hmmm, maybe it's time for Steve to start copying Mike Dell a little. But just a little.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to say that ZDNet's graphic for this article, which shows two giant ants attacking a pair of Dell laptops (complete with funky target designs to reinforce the idea of "attack"), are really, really funny. (Actually, the ants appear to be facing the wrong way. Whatever.) All we can say is, if the Dell systems really did come with a ten-inch-long ant in the box, we bet sales wouldn't be quite so brisk.