How about that Apple Studio Display, yeah? If you've seen one up close and personal, you're probably as impressed as we are with its crispness and brightness; for a monitor that's only about three inches thick, it's a very nice image. And personally, we were blown away by the quality of its interpolated 640x480 and 832x624 resolutions-- since it's an LCD panel, those 1024x768 pixels are there to stay, yet the antialiased pixel-skipping approximation of those lower resolutions was pretty amazingly nice to look at, as opposed to the horribly jagged and ugly renditions we've seen on competing models. While we were bigger fans of the old "midnight blue" of the first models, the El-Capitan-matching Blueberry and Ice of the current models isn't bad, either-- and given that the color change accompanied a price drop to $1099, we think we can live without the midnight blue. Or we could, if we were in any kind of financial position to blow $1099 on a fifteen-inch monitor.

Whoops, did we say $1099? We meant $1299. Or, at least, Apple means $1299. While it's not behavior that we're used to seeing in the tech market, Apple's apparently thinking differently again and raising the price of its stylish LCD Studio Display. A quick visit to the Apple Store confirms what MacNN was reporting: the flat-panel Apple Studio Display is now listed at $1299. We checked a couple of third-party resellers and the price there seems to be holding steady at the lower value right now, but you can bet that'll change pretty quickly if Apple's raised the Minimum Advertised Price as reported. Remember back when Steve Jobs publicly claimed that "Columbus" was Apple's secret anti-gravity technology? Perhaps it's finished, and Apple's using it on its display prices.

That said, based on what we've seen in the marketplace, $1299 is still a great price for such a snazzy display, and to a certain extent, we think we understand Apple's logic: relatively few people are really going to be willing to drop $1099 on a display whose primary benefit, besides freeing up some desk space, is its "wow factor." But of those people who do want the LCD Studio Display and who were perfectly willing to blow $1099 on one, there are probably very few who wouldn't pay $1299 instead. We don't know what drove up the price; perhaps LCD panels themselves have started getting more expensive again. Regardless, it's a little sobering to consider that an LCD Apple Studio Display now costs a hundred bucks more than a complete 333 MHz iMac. Yowza.

So have you collected all four yet? We speak, as if we had to clarify, of the new Star Wars: Episode I commercials that Apple has posted to its web site. Apple is still riding the Star Wars hype, and we can't think of a better way to increase their visibility. Let's put it this way: remember when the iMac first came out last August? There were customers waiting in line the night before, eager to get their hands on one of the very first Bondi Blue beauties off the truck-- and yet, the frenzy was reportedly nothing like the riots that started when hordes of fed-up Windows 3.1 users finally got within hours of the release date of Windows 95. But even Windows users didn't quit their jobs and move across the country to wait in line for over a month for 95's release, and that's just what some fans are doing to secure one of the very first tickets for the new Star Wars flick. Now that's hype.

So what better way to push QuickTime than by releasing Star Wars trailers and commercials over the Internet exclusively in QuickTime format? Better yet, now that QuickTime 4 is out in "preview" form, Apple's providing versions of the videos that offer better sound and video quality if you're using the very latest and greatest version of everyone's favorite multimedia architecture. And the hype is working, because according to a CNET article, Apple claims the big Episode I trailer has now been downloaded over ten million times-- and a million of those downloads were for the new, improved QuickTime 4-only version of the video. Now that's using the Force.

As for the new commercials themselves, personally, we don't find them terribly exciting, as least not compared to the action-packed trailer. (That didn't stop us from downloading and saving all four, however.) In fact, call us crazy (go on, you do anyway), but they remind us a little bit of the original "Think Different" commercial: emotional, introspective voice-over with music, montage of lots of video clips, closing with a simple two-word phrase on a black background. We really liked the "Think Different" ad, though, so we've got to wonder if these Star Wars commercials would be better with grainy black and white footage instead...

We admit it; we at AtAT are just a bit bummed at how relatively little dirt is being dished about Apple's PDA, expected to be called the "MacMate." It isn't just that we love it when the rumors fly-- though, of course, we do. It's also this overwhelming sense that with so little buzz about the product, it must be pretty darn far from ever seeing a store shelf. Now, we know that's not necessarily the case; for example, the surprise announcement of the iMac took just about everyone off guard, and those were winging their way into stores a scant three months later. Given Apple's voiced intention to release a Newton-replacing PDA, though, the rumor well's run pretty dry. The best we've seen recently was the speculation at O'Grady's PowerPage that Apple could conceivably build a MacMate around the Newton 2100's StrongARM chip, which could then run the legendary Mac OS Lite and emulate a Palm, which runs much more slowly. Neat idea, but it's really just a guess.

Anyway, so there we were, surfing around the 'net as per the usual, when suddenly a link appeared that demanded to be clicked-- "Spied: MacMate and PalmOS." Clicking on anything that promises more MacMate information has become a reflex action in the AtAT studios, so suddenly there it was, clear as day, proudly adorning the MacProvider web site: a color photo of a Palm III with an Apple logo on its cover. Was this the first photographic evidence of the fruits of the Apple/Palm collaboration? Could this, in fact, be the long-rumored Apple/Palm co-branded PDA?

Well, uh, no. The site claims that the two photos were found "embedded deep within a Japanese site" (no link given) and due to the discoverer's inability to read Japanese, there was no way to know just what the captions had said. But it doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes (even an Inspector Clouseau) to see what's going on here: the first photo clearly shows a Palm's cover detached, with an apple-shaped hole cut out of the center; the second shows the cover back on the Palm, with a multicolored Apple logo where the hole used to be-- and an X-acto knife on the table behind it. The Japanese site was apparently explaining how to cut an Apple logo from, say, a dead PowerBook and "implant" in into one's Palm device; a nifty crafts project, to be sure, but not exactly the MacMate we're all waiting for. Curse these keen eyes of ours, these skeptical minds! Had we been just a little more blindly accepting, we could have had rumor fodder for weeks, but noooo...