So your LC II is feeling a little pokey and you've been looking longingly at the specs for the new Powermac G3's, but your budget won't let you spring for such an extravagant early Christmas present to yourself. What can you do? Sit tight, because Apple Recon is reporting that many "low cost high quality" Apple-branded Macs, including sub-$1000 ones, are gearing up for the holiday season.

Exactly what kind of Mac can you expect for under $1000? Recon doesn't say, but they hint that these low-cost Macs will run Rhapsody Unified when it ships later next year. That implies a fairly powerful box. We at AtAT are postulating that they may be overstocked and discontinued 7600's, but we're bringing new meaning to the term "uneducated guess" here.

Keep an eye peeled at your favorite Mac source-- apparently these machines will be offered via retail stores, catalog resellers, and the Apple Store alike. If you've been holding off on an upgrade, this may be just what you were waiting for. We take this stance: If your machine won't run Myth: The Fallen Lords, you really should take advantage of these upcoming deals.

The latest round in Microsoft's grudge match with the U.S. Department of Justice occurred yesterday, when the DoJ urged Judge Thomas Penfeld Jackson to body-slam Bill & Co. with a $1 million-a-day fine for violating a 1995 federal court order. You know the drill by now: the DoJ claims that Microsoft is forcing Wintel manufacturers to ship machines preloaded with Internet Explorer; Microsoft claims that--get this--MSIE is an integrated component of Windows 95. (Hee, hee... that still kills us.)

Since Microsoft does not have Steve Jobs' patented Reality Distortion Field®, they appear unable to feed the DoJ this load of hooey; justice lawyers yesterday stated that "Microsoft seeks to rewrite this history... by attempting to characterize the Internet Explorer as an 'integrated' component of Windows 95, rather than a separate product." But imagine if Bill did get a hold of Steve's mass-hypnosis device... Microsoft would be unstoppable! A scary thought, indeed.

Meanwhile, circumstantial evidence pointing to other Microsoft anticompetitive practices continues to mount. The gents at MacOS Rumors report that they've collected some 200-odd examples of "suspicious" behavior by Microsoft's browsers and web servers, including today's report by a reader who found that he was unable to download Netscape Communicator while using Internet Explorer 3.01. Netscape's site reported that it was unable to set a "cookie" on the reader's machine, despite the fact that the reader had numerous cookies from numerous other sources-- just not one from Netscape. In addition, Netscape Navigator downloaded the software just fine.

AtAT can't confirm this behavior (we won't let MSIE near our beloved PowerTower), but we agree with Rumors that it sounds suspicious, and similar to the reports that MSIE is given higher priority than Netscape Navigator when connecting to Microsoft's Internet Information Server software, thus making Netscape seem slower. Hmmm. Hey, DoJ; got a minute?