Not that this comes as any particular surprise, but Sears is playing the classic retail game when it comes to pricing the iMac. You know the one; jack up the "regular price" of an item, so you can then offer a lower "special sale price" that, coincidentally, just happens to be the regular price everywhere else. So while the iMac debuted at Sears sporting a $1299 price tag, MacCentral reports that, for the official rollout this Sunday, Sears will indeed be lowering the iMac's price to the spectacular level of $1199! That's a fantastic 8% savings... off their regular 108% price. Hee hee, we love this stuff...

Not that Sears doesn't have anything to offer, mind you-- we are very glad to see them on board the iMac bandwagon. With 844 stores nationwide, including several in hard-to-reach places, the Sears deal offers a level of coverage few other retail chains can match. Better still, it means that the average consumer can now buy an iMac at that temple of reckless spending known as The Mall. And then there's the issue of Sears' own financing program: customers who buy an iMac using their Sears charge card reap the benefits of 0% interest through January of 2000. So yeah, there are definitely some serious benefits to having Sears on Apple's side, even if it means we have to watch hokey little stunts like the "raise the price and then put it on sale" game. Heck, at least it's entertaining, right?

In our opinion, the "special sale price" scam, while hovering right up there, isn't the top of the heap when it comes to sleazy retail tricks; that honor goes to the perennial "going out of business sale." (The two often go hand in hand.) Pretty much everyone knows of at least one store that's had signs saying "Going Out Of Business-- Everything Must Go!!!" on display for a ridiculously long time. There was a rug store in the Boston area who seemed to have been going out of business for a good solid four years at least, before somebody in authority finally ordered them to stop the sale or close their doors. It was a sad, sad day when that sale ended... Now where will we buy our rich oriental rugs at up to 70% off?

As usual, Apple Insider's got the fun dirt, though of course we couldn't even begin to speculate about whether or not it's really true. They've finally shed some light on the cryptic reference to a "sidekick" that popped up in their latest report on the upcoming consumer portable, virtually guaranteed for a Macworld Expo introduction next month. When we saw the word "sidekick," our minds were inexorably drawn toward the whole Apple-branded handheld thing; was there to be a surprise unveiling of the Newton's successor?

Alas, no-- if Apple Insider is correct, what we'll see instead is the first big revision of the consumer powerhouse known as the iMac. Notice that we said "big" revision; we're not talking about the small stuff like upping the processor speed, replacing the graphics chip, expanding the hard drive, or injecting new fruit flavors. The new iMac, code-named "C2," reportedly represents a significant leap forward in the iMac's evolution, introducing a completely new and "radically redesigned" enclosure, which adds easy access to the unit's innards-- no more disassembling your entire iMac just to upgrade the RAM. There's also the possibility of DVD and FireWire, which may sound like high-end features, but they would just fit in so well with the whole consumer video-editing and movie-watching scenario. Throw in a larger 15"-viewable screen, stir, and voilà-- C2 à la Steve.

Apparently the Mysterious Mr. Jobs has been cranking up the volume on the C2 project, whipping the development and design team into a frenzy in hopes of getting a couple hundred machines squeezed out in time to show them at the Expo. The consumer portable would have offered plenty of drama on its own, but putting it on stage with a new iMac ought to juice the Expo crowd with enough excitement to incite a riot-- a good kind of riot, but a riot nonetheless. We're anxious to see what comes to pass... and we'll probably be wearing helmets, just in case.

There's only just over a week to go before TNT debuts its long-awaited Steve Jobs/Bill Gates biopic, "The Pirates of Silicon Valley," and the AtAT staff is getting restless. Sure, we've been through the web site and taken the Silicon Quiz, played the little Shockwave versions of all those classic games like "Pong" and "Breakout" (ah, the misspent hours of our lost youth...), etc., but we're just itching for the actual televisual experience-- we're still kicking ourselves for sleeping instead of channel-surfing a couple of weeks ago when TNT aired it unannounced and in the middle of the night so it could qualify for the Emmys.

So we're grateful that MacWEEK posted a fairly in-depth review of the movie, which discusses lots of what happens on-screen. It looks to be a pretty entertaining ride, all told, and we're not exactly sure that it's a valid criticism to say that the movie makes Jobs look bad. Whether it actually does or not is beyond our judgment at this point, but if it was a directorial choice to vilify Jobs, hey, we're game-- it's all in the name of entertainment. However, if the director is in fact guilty of having "left out so much of Steve's vision and confused his charisma with brutish management techniques," that's a different story. (We're pretty sure we read somewhere that both Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had given semi-reluctant "thumbs up" ratings for the movie, so apparently if it does make Jobs look like a jerk, well, even Jobs thinks it's somewhat accurate.)

Or maybe it's ER's Noah Wyle that had a tough time capturing the magic that is Steve. Nothing against Noah's talent, of course; we imagine it must be darn close to impossible to portray a man with a Reality Distortion Field and to do it without making the character look like a psychotic. The good news is, whether he succeeds or not, either result is likely to be fun to watch. Start the countdown!