Ahhh, price wars-- what a beautiful thing, hmmm? In the middle of last week, Best Buy launched a nasty strike on other iMac resellers, which we assume was prompted by slow sales when compared to the other guys like CompUSA, who had some really attractive bundling deals set up. What Best Buy did was send everyone into a tizzy by dropping their price on the iMac from the standard $1299 to $999. Suddenly, the iMac was a sub-$1000 machine-- even though Apple didn't see it that way. As far as Apple's concerned, the iMac is still a $1299 unit. Best Buy's playing by their own rules.

Anyway, things got even crazier when Best Buy suddenly noticed that they were selling a lot of $999 iMacs. And we mean a lot-- so it wasn't too long before Best Buy's higher-ups realized that they had maybe priced things just a wee bit too competitively. On Friday morning, the official Best Buy price for an iMac rose a bit to $1099, though it took a while for the word to spread throughout all of the stores. In fact, we'd be willing to bet that there are still at least a few Best Buy outlets out there that are still selling iMacs for the magical price of $999. Grab 'em if you can find 'em. (Reportedly, $999 is actually below Best Buy's cost for an iMac, so they were losing money on every unit sold. Kinda makes us wonder how that price ever snuck through in the first place, but we don't claim to understand retail sales.)

While Webintosh originally reported that Best Buy raised their price due to Apple pressure, a MacWEEK article states otherwise, quoting both Apple and Best Buy representatives as saying that Best Buy alone determines its prices. Whatever. The really interesting bit about all this is that CompUSA fought back: reportedly, several CompUSA stores had a special $999 price on iMacs this past weekend, as part of the final push to sell on the last shopping weekend before Christmas. If this kind of struggle keeps going, pretty soon the iMac will be a $1299 computer in Apple's eyes only.

Meanwhile, people continue to push the envelope as far as the iMac's upgradability is concerned. The iMac, as designed, is one of the least expandable computers on the market today: it has zero expansion slots (at least, officially speaking), no SCSI, no ADB, no "standard" serial ports, no additional drive bays-- in fact, just about the only thing that you are supposed to be able to upgrade is the RAM. That doesn't mean that people haven't come up with some pretty ingenious ways of making the iMac into something other than that which Apple conceived. We've heard of all kinds of horseplay, like soldering floppy drives to the motherboard and adding arcade-quality 3D gaming support via the undocumented "Perch" slot. And now that LinuxPPC has preliminary USB support, you've even got people out there running Unix on Apple's beloved "consumer" machine. The bottom line is this: the iMac is too cool to be left alone. It beckons geeks bearing soldering irons and chewing gum; to them, the iMac just begs to be hotrodded up.

There's one area in which we hadn't heard of any compelling hacks, though, and that's the field of processor upgradeability. For instance, the PCI PowerMacs (with the exception of the 7200) had their processors on a daughtercard, allowing an easy upgrade to a faster chip; popping a G3 into a 7300 is a piece of cake. The PowerMac G3's took a slightly different route; no daughtercard, but the chip's in a ZIF socket, making it a pretty simple matter to replace it with a zippier processor, which you can purchase from any number of third party manufacturers these days. But the iMac is a little tricky. From what we've heard, the iMac's processor is on a daughtercard, but it shares that daughtercard with the Mac's hardware ROM. Since the ROMs for the iMac have to come from Apple, that makes third-party processor upgrades for the iMac a tough thing to pull off. At least, that was our impression.

However, if iMac2Day can be believed, some company called Terrahertz International has an iMac processor upgrade for sale right now. For just $250, you can pick up a Terra 266/G3 iMac Speed Kit as a Christmas present for your funky blue friend. Not only do you get a 266 MHz G3 processor module that (somehow) works in your iMac, but you also get a 64 MB memory module and Mac OS 8.5. (Note that current iMacs already ship with Mac OS 8.5 pre-loaded, and owners of previous iMacs qualify for a $20 upgrade from Apple. Still, it's kinda cool.) Sounds like you get a lot for your $250. We don't know how it works, and in fact there isn't even a website to visit-- to order, you actually have to send them email or a fax. How 1996! But hey, if it's all legit, this could be the start of some serious iMac speed upgrades to come.