Okay, we all know that when Steve Jobs retook the helm at Apple, the whole product line was a big stinking mess. It's not that the products themselves were particularly bad (well, okay, the Power Mac 4400 belongs in the Apple Hall of Shame), but they revealed a certain lack of direction. Consider, for example, the actual names of the products at the time: Apple gave every product a number, which told potential buyers absolutely nothing about the Mac itself. It wasn't related to clock speed, disk size, or any aspect of the computer other than the chassis type-- and did Apple really expect customers to know that a 7x00 Mac used a desktop enclosure, while an 8x00 was a minitower? Worse yet, you couldn't even assume that a higher number equalled a better or newer computer! The 7600 was an incremental improvement over the 7500, but the next release in that series was the 7300. It was enough to make any semi-logical being stick a fork in the nearest electrical outlet.

Then came Mighty Steve, with his grand plan to simplify things. And now we're much better off-- first of all, Macs have easy-to-remember, highly marketable names instead of numbers. Better yet, those names actually indicate who should buy the product (Power for pros, i for consumers) and whether you'd stick it on your desk or throw it in your bag (Mac for desktop, Book for portable). Simple, right? Easy. Fun for the whole family. Until Apple started shipping later versions of all those products, and then all hell broke loose. We've had the PowerBook G3, the PowerBook G3 Series, and the PowerBook G3 (bronze keyboard.) There's the Power Macintosh G3 and the Power Macintosh G3 (blue and white). And iMacs are the worst of all-- there's the original Bondi models, which came in revisions A and B. There are the original fruit-flavored ones, commonly referred to as revisions C and D, but more properly called the iMac/266 and the iMac/333. And now the "Kihei" iMacs are out, and there are three of those: the iMac/350, the iMac/400 DV, and the iMac DV Special Edition. We've got our forks ready; now where's that outlet?

And so we're intrigued by Mac OS Rumors' report that Apple is now considering moving to a "model year" strategy in order to differentiate the various incarnations of the same product. If the rumor is true, then the next PowerBook G3, for example, may be emblazoned with the title of "PowerBook G3 2000." Sure, the numbers are back, but at least they mean something obvious to the average buyer, so we're in favor of such a move. Plus we think it'd be fun to watch Mac dealers start morphing into car dealership mode, with "year-end model clearances" and the like. A word of advice, though: don't spring for the rustproof undercoating on your next PowerBook, no matter how hard the salesman sells it-- it's a rip-off.

For those who doubted that the iMac would have an impact on computer style industry-wide, doubt no more. The iMac clones are one thing-- it was utterly predictable that at least a few companies would go for the cheap score by simply copying Apple's design. It's a better indication of Apple's influence, though, when the big-name PC manufacturers start adopting iMac-like color choices. Dell was one of the first, unsurprisingly, with its iBook-inspired consumer laptops, available in two colors. Given Mike Dell's psychotic fixation on Steve Jobs, one might be tempted to write that off as an anomaly. But now Hewlett-Packard is offering its customers a choice of computer colors, and that's no fluke.

Yes, Hewlett-Packard-- the computer megagiant best described as "stodgy." They are Old Iron; they are Geeks-R-Us, with their UNIX workstations and their scientific calculators. They are the Beigest of the Beige. And yet, as faithful viewer Arthur Frame points out in an HP press release, they are offering "case, keyboard, and mouse color options" now that beige is a four-letter word. (Bayj?) Oh, sure, they haven't totally ditched their geeky tendencies; whereas Apple's colors are named whimsically after fruit flavors, HP's are "inspired by the elements of the periodic table": cobalt blue, krypton green, xenon purple, and the default titanium gray. But hey, we're not averse to Geek Chic.

In fact, we kind of like the way that different manufacturers are using the whole "theme names" thing. Apple's got candy fruit flavors-- after naming a translucent blue-green after the water at a beach in Australia, that is. Dell uses "Storm Grey" and "Tahoe Blue," so they've got a sort of water/weather thing going on. Now HP's got elements from the periodic table. And it's not just colors, either; there's Intel's chip names, like "Celeron" and "Itanium," which are thematically linked by the fact that both names are unimaginably stupid. See? Everyone can play!

Okay, we admit it-- we're suckers for cheesy theme parodies of pop-culture hits. While we'll run screaming from a lot of the popular dreck that pollutes the waters of our collective media pool (someone tell us just how in hell "Full House" stayed on the air all those years), if you take an insipid show and rewrite it as a parody incorporating elements from some other aspect of popular culture, we're there. Urkel vs. Regis Philbin in a fight to the death? Sign us up. Tinky-Winky is assigned Monica Lewinsky as a backstage personal aide and hilarity ensues? Cool, what's the URL? It's even better when the parody is based on something we enjoyed in the first place, and knocking something lame is a plus, too.

And so, we were thrilled when faithful viewer Shane Burgess pointed us towards IDG's Blair Witch Project parody, the "Rare Glitch Project": "three student filmmakers disappeared in a building in Redmond, Washington, while shooting a documentary... they are attempting to document the Rare Glitch Project, a legendary version of Microsoft Windows designed to be compact and stable." That's comedy gold, people!

But best of all is the poll posted at the end of the parody, which asks readers whether they think Windows 95/98 is a buggy operating system. Is it any surprise that out of the 39,000 people who voted, 92% said "yes"? Faithful viewer Alan Clingan notes that there should be a follow-up question for those people:

If you voted yes and you own Windows, why did you buy it?

• a) Stoopid
• b) Don't know any better
• c) Every other OS is going out of business
• d) Masochist

To that, we'd add the following:

If you were one of the 3,000 people who said Windows is not buggy, where do you buy your crack?

• a) Needle Park
• b) That scary coworker with the eyepatch
• c) No crack, but I suffered severe head trauma as a small child
• d) No crack, but I get my brown acid from Steve Jobs

Just a thought...