It may not rank right up there with George Bailey being handed bushels of cash from concerned friends and family, but it could be considered a Christmas Miracle in many circles: a $300 price drop on what we could classify as the "Furbie" of the consumer computer market (if, say, Furbies were still amazingly popular without being ugly and annoying). That's right; according to MacNN, iMacs are selling for $999 in at least some Best Buy stores around the country. If you were waiting for the fabled iMac sub-$1000 price drop, you may want to check out your local Best Buy outlet to see what's up.

As far as we can tell, this isn't an indication of an Apple-sanctioned, market-wide price drop on the iMac, but rather a case of retail competition in action. By most reports, Best Buy has been having the living stuffing kicked out of them by rival iMac-seller CompUSA ever since Best Buy took the late plunge back into the Mac business last month. Heck, on Best Buy's inaugural iMac-selling weekend, CompUSA bundled in a free scanner and printer and stole their thunder. Ever since, we've been hearing that the rate of iMac sales from Best Buy is minuscule compared to CompUSA's numbers. So apparently now that they've been out-bundled and out-saleshelped by CompUSA, Best Buy is competing in the arena they handle best: price. And "iMac for $999!" may sound a lot better from a marketing standpoint than "iMac for $1299 with free scanner and printer!" even though the second offer may be the better deal.

Now, the reports don't specify that the $999 iMacs are new-in-box and factory sealed, so they might be open-box customer returns. We suppose they could even be rev. A models, though we highly doubt that-- Best Buy didn't leap into the iMac fray until after the rev. B's started shipping, so we would be surprised to hear that even a single rev. A machine had ever set cute translucent flip-down foot inside a Best Buy store. And this also all assumes that the reports of $999 iMacs are even true in the first place, though we certainly see no particular reason to doubt them. But for a Christmas Miracle to occur, you have to believe...

"In my day, we didn't have all this 'pre-emptive multitasking' and 'symmetric multiprocessing' hoo-haa. When you wanted to run more than one application, your background tasks could slow to a crawl, or stop altogether-- and we liked it. We loved it. Pre-emptive multitasking was for candy-butt wussies who couldn't deal with the bracing feel of total computing stasis when a menu was clicked down. And if you wanted the power of more than one processor, you waited until the companies who made the application you used decided to make their products multiprocessor-aware, and then you waited for Apple to release a multiprocessor Mac, which damn near never happened. But it built character. And we liked it."

Sound familiar? Probably not-- because we poor Mac users still deal with using an "old and creaky" operating system all the time. We are the Buzzword Challenged; we endure the pain of cooperative multitasking and single-processor systems every day of our pathetic little lives. (Never mind that studies show Mac users to be more productive and happier with their computing tasks than users of other operating systems; the fact that an elegant and consistent interface and attention to detail appears to affect overall user productivity and satisfaction more than "modern operating system features" is totally beside the point. If you don't have buzzwords like "symmetric multiprocessing" and "protected memory," you're a dinosaur.)

But the fact is, we might be ranting endlessly about the Buzzwordless Days sooner than we expected. Sure, Mac OS X will deliver all those modern features in late 1999, but now according to AppleInsider, Mac OS 8.6 (code-named "Veronica") may also gain some of those features when it surfaces in the spring. 8.6 reportedly will contain a new nanokernel supporting "full symmetric multiprocessor capability and will feature a high performance preemption-safe memory allocator," and "integrated multitasking," which (we will go out on a very long limb to surmise) may be "pre-emptive" instead of "cooperative." And then we Old-Timers will tell all those Mac OS 8.6-using kids about the "good old days," when you could pause your whole Mac by holding the mouse button down.

Let's face it: when it comes to "Redmond Justice," Microsoft is getting hammered. The government has trotted out witness after witness, each of whom testified that Microsoft had engaged in business activities that were, at best, "shaky" from an antitrust standpoint. True, any one of those testimonies might not be particularly damning (though some of them are), but when viewed all together, it's hard to believe that the judge isn't squarely on the Department of Justice's side right now. That could all change once Microsoft's witnesses start taking the stand, but as of now, few observers could think that Microsoft isn't at least a few points down on the courtroom scoreboard.