Lawsuits, lawsuits everywhere! Never let it be said that Apple doesn't know how to show a copycat a good time. First they filed suit against Future Power because their E-Power system looks like its designers cloned an iMac, replaced its guts with Wintel gunk, fed it lots of fattening foods, and then beat it with an Ugly Stick™. So what did you think was going to happen when low-cost PC king eMachines quietly pushed its eOne onto Circuit City's shelves earlier this month? After all, the eOne is blue and white, translucent, roughly egg-shaped, has a handle, and looks like its creators did just what Future Power's engineers did, only without the fatty foods. (We haven't seen an eOne up close yet, but the Ugly Stick™ appears to have had a hand in this rip-off's creation, too.)

So yeah, now Apple's suing eMachines, too. (Thanks to faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil for letting us know before we stumbled upon the info ourselves.) Heck, if they didn't, then Future Power's defense would have been as simple as, "Well, those guys are doing pretty much the same thing we are. How come you didn't sue them?" A Reuters story has more on this latest move in what's practically becoming trendy at this point: legal action against companies who'd rather steal a proven design than come up with one on their own. So much for all those pundits who opined that the iMac's distinctive look wouldn't affect PC designs in the least. Instead, now every time some two-bit manufacturer decides to build an iMac clone, Apple's going to have to sue just to prevent its former suits from failing. And given the long-standing industry tradition of stealing from Apple, the lawyers in Cupertino may be in for a long year or two.

But not to fear; apparently Apple's got the whole "suing for copying the iMac's design" process down to a science. Don't believe us? Then take a gander at Apple's press release announcing the lawsuit filed against eMachines. Does it seem strangely familiar? If so, it's probably because you once read Apple's July press release announcing the Future Power suit; they're almost identical, with just the names of the companies changed. Even more interesting is how the included Steve Jobs quotes are almost the same: "There is a universe of original designs that [Future Power / eMachines] could have created for their computers, but instead they chose to copy Apple's designs. We've invested a lot of money and effort to create and market our award-winning designs, and we intend to vigorously protect them under the law." Now, there are two possibilities here. The first is that Steve Jobs has the spontaneity of a sedated Al Gore, and he really said those same exact sentences twice. The second is that Apple's legal department has a Virtual Steve that they can use to generate appropriate Steveisms, all as a part of a massive scripted litigation sequence. Ah, the magic of AppleScript! We bet the whole lawsuit-slapping procedure is performed with one double-click.

Wanna buy an iMac for $599? You're probably saying to yourself, "That's a great deal on an original 233 MHz iMac!" But what if we told you your $599 would get you your choice of Lime or Tangerine? "You mean it's a discontinued/refurbished 266 MHz model? Even better!" But no, we're talking about a brand new, 333 MHz iMac for only $599. Sound too good to be true? Then how about blue and white Power Mac G3s for $999 to $1899, or a 17" Studio Display for $199? Or one of those sweet flat-panel Studio Displays for $599? Or the mammoth 21" Studio Display with built-in ColorSync for $699? Yeah, you're telling us we're crazy. But we're not the ones offering these incredible deals; Apple is.

That's right, it's Crazy Steve's Discount Outlet! All you need to take advantage of these insaaaane prices is to be showing off your wares at Seybold in a couple of weeks. Well, okay, that's a pretty big catch, but it's still fun to look at the prices on the order form PDF and drool. The other catch is that the program expires on Friday the 20th. As in, right now. So if you are a registered exhibitor at Seybold and you want some good stuff cheap, head over to MacWEEK for more info on this killer deal, or go straight to Apple's Developer Connection and get the info from the source.

Of course, the big question on everyone's mind is, why is Apple offering price cuts of up to fifty percent on low-margin equipment as well as on the more expensive stuff? Discounts of this magnitude are unprecedented, to the best of our knowledge. We've got two theories, ourselves. First, Apple understands how important it is to maintain maximum visibility at Seybold, given that conference's close ties with Apple's core market of graphic folks; selling lots of brightly-colored systems at a loss in return for having them shown at booths all over the show floor is a worthwhile advertising expense. But the other theory is more interesting: doesn't it seem like Apple's trying very hard to get rid of lots of this gear? Perhaps in preparation for newer stuff, like the "Kihei" iMac and the Power Mac G4? The flushing of stock is always a harbinger of new toys in the pipeline...

Strange days, indeed... We admit befuddlement as to just what's going on with the I and the M in the AIM PowerPC alliance. The Big M (Motorola, that is) just announced that it wants to buy out Metrowerks, the makers of CodeWarrior, the "integrated development environment of choice" for many a Mac programmer. Meanwhile, the Big I (IBM. Easy, right?) has been unabashedly flaunting a free CHRP-based PowerPC motherboard design all over town, telling box-makers that it's just the thing to throw in a LinuxPPC system. And if you're the paranoid type, you might get the idea that both of these moves look like horning in on Apple's relatively stable and quiet little world right now.

The Motorola-Metrowerks thing doesn't freak us out all that much, but this CHRP-based motherboard from IBM is food for thought. In fact, it's a downright feast, as in seven-course meal followed by an after-dinner mint and a large pizza. For those young'uns out there who don't remember CHRP, that's the Common Hardware Reference Platform that was supposed to make the PowerPC more viable for more uses; rather than have PowerPCs only in proprietary Macs, CHRP was a plan to have a single motherboard that could run the Mac OS, Windows NT, various flavors of Unix, and more. But CHRP threatened Apple in a big way, since porting the Mac OS to it would mean that anyone could build a Mac clone based on CHRP without having to get Apple's approval. Remember, Apple's licensing program at the time was very poorly thought out, and if Steve Jobs can be believed (for some that's a big "if"), Apple was losing money on every clone sold.

So the Mac OS was never ported to CHRP (it still needs a hardware ROM), and pretty much neither was anything else. But IBM's resuscitated CHRP motherboard does run Linux, and it is a free reference design that anyone can use. Well, guess what? We're hearing whispers about projects Apple to get the Mac OS running on the new motherboard, and we don't just mean the whispers at Mac OS Rumors. Yes, third parties are working on getting Mac OS X Server working on the CHRP hardware via the Darwin open source components, but sources hint that something much, much bigger is going down. While we doubt that we're looking at a full-fledged leap back into Mac cloning, little birds are CHRPing in our ears and the three things that keep coming up are "IBM," "Mac OS," and "license." IBM-branded Mac OS X Server systems don't seem unlikely, but could Apple be testing the waters by providing IBM with a license to produce Mac OS X-- as in client, not server-- desktop systems based on the CHRP motherboard? A whole different kind of blue Mac. Speculate at will.