Will the life-improving wonders of the Mac never cease? You already know that owning an iMac in a flavor matched to your personal aura and operating it on a schedule attuned to your natural biorhythms can reduce stress, improve your mental health, and promote a general sense of oneness with the Universe. But did you know that the Mac can also be an effective aid in the struggle to stop smoking? 'Strue. C'mon, would we lie to you?

Okay, we sense skepticism out there. But here's the scoop: my sister Lisa has been a Mac user for maybe five years now-- and a smoker for almost twenty. She was introduced to her first Mac when she bought a friend's old LC III to supplement her ancient 286 laptop. Since then, she's been squeezing every last drop of use out of that 68030-based Mac-- sending email, surfing the Web, playing goofy shareware games, and even doing layout for a nonprofit newspaper in Pagemaker. (Yes, we said it's an LC III. Crazy, huh?) Well, finally her needs far outstripped what that earnest but tired old Mac could do, and a week ago she bought a standard Blueberry iMac. Predictably, the speed increase blew her away, but it was the iMac's feng shui that led to an unexpected health benefit. "The iMac is still in my bedroom," she wrote, "and I don't smoke in the bedroom, so it's actually improving my health."

There you have it, plain and simple. The lure of the iMac is such that its beautiful and inviting nature overwhelms any other impulse; by placing it in a no-smoking zone, you've got a deterrent more effective than electroshock aversion therapy. Once your body has associated smoking with being deprived of the iMac's cheerful company, those nicotine cravings will fade-- it's a drug-free quitting strategy, and besides, the iMac is more lickable than any nicotine patch. Plus, we bet this phenomenon could be used to battle all kinds of addiction. We foresee a creative variety of progressive addiction treatment programs: fruit-flavored needle exchanges, a state-of-the-art iMac lab in the Betty Ford Clinic, custom-engineered iBooks that monitor the user's bloodstream and shut down when controlled substances are detected, etc. Of course, then we'll have a society rampant with Mac addiction, but everyone knows there's no cure for that.

Everyone knows that computing technology in evolving into "appliances," right? The buzz in the industry is that real people don't want computers, which are expensive, complex, and hard to use. They want "Internet appliances," which we can only assume means that there's a growing market for blenders and Salad Shooters that can look up current stock prices. Hey, who doesn't want to fetch driving directions while mixing up a big bowl of cake batter? Or, if by "Internet appliance" they mean a cheap, simplified, nonthreatening computer that specializes in accessing the Web, then we've got plenty of systems on the market that achieve that goal with varying degrees of success.

But what you may not know is that the "Internet appliance" fad is quickly fading. The next big thing in this industry is actually going to be "Internet furniture." Apparently some genius figured out that reading up-to-the-minute news headlines off the side of a toaster isn't all it's cracked up to be, and decided that the integration of Internet technologies into comfortable furniture is much more likely to catch on with the general public. And faithful viewer Kent Hull clued us in to the first volley in what will surely be a vicious battle to market iFurniture: according to a Reuters story, La-Z-Boy has teamed up with Microsoft to present the "e-cliner," a comfy recliner with a WebTV unit built right into the armrest. (All it needs is a Twinkie dispenser in the other armrest and you've got the ultimate in American decadence.)

All we can say is, we sure hope Apple's got something brewing to compete. Sure, an AirPort-enabled iBook makes for comfy feet-up surfing in the love seat of your choice (as we can well confirm), and it does a lot more than WebTV, besides. But with La-Z-Boy's e-cliner starting at $999, the iBook is a lot more expensive-- especially when you factor in the cost of your furniture. No, we figure Apple's going to have to come up with something more holistic. And we don't mind telling you, we can't wait to see what a G4-powered, AirPort-connected, Jonathan Ive-designed living room set is going to look like. Do we get a choice of fruit flavors for the throw pillows?

Leave it to Apple to master the art of turning other people's commercials into ads for their own technology. Remember back when Star Wars: Episode I was the most hotly-anticipated cinematic event in the history of film? That was, of course, before people got to see how much of a letdown it was. Really, let's be honest for a second, here... without even getting into the whole Jar-Jar issue, think back to when the lights came down in the theater and you sat there with your adrenaline pumping, hardly believing you were finally going to see Episode I, ready for another chapter in the epic struggle of Dark versus Light. When you read those scrolling words that faded off into the blackness of space, didn't you just think to yourself, "Wait a minute, did that say trade embargoes?!"

But we digress. Our point is, when the whole world was in the grip of Episode I fever, Apple scored a major coup by hosting the Internet version of the movie's trailers exclusively in QuickTime format. Downloads of QuickTime shot through the roof, as dazed fans scrambled to snatch up any info they could find on the film. Apple got a huge PR boost by showing somebody else's commercial. How efficient was that? And ever since then, of course, Apple's been posting QuickTime versions of tons of movie trailers, continuing to promote its multimedia delivery architecture just by hyping other people's products.

Well, recently Apple's gotten even better at it. Now the QuickTime trailers even feature Apple's logo and the "Think Different" slogan in the Flash-interface "letterbox" area below the trailers themselves. You can see this in the brand-new Lord of the Rings preview pointed out by faithful viewer Jean Willi. Pretty spiffy work, if we do say so ourselves-- and the movie looks to be shaping up well, too. Plus, we're pretty sure that when Lord of the Rings is released in Christmastime of 2001, it'll have awesome special effects and it won't be about trade embargoes. Bonus!