Wouldn't you know it? Mere moments after we introduced what we hoped would be a delightfully wacky and subversive mental image (Steve Jobs recalling defective Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh units just so he could smash them to bits with a heavy blunt instrument), word came down that the whole "recall for mass destruction" concept isn't all that deranged after all. According to the PowerBook Zone, hot on the heels of Apple's "send us your TAM, we'll send you a G4" service plan comes a similar scheme for the owners of certain Amelio-era laptops out there. From now until the end of the month, there's a bounty on the heads of the crash-prone, bezel-cracking, PC-looking PowerBook 5300 and 190 series laptops. Apple wants them dead or alive, and the reward is $700 off the cost of a Pismo PowerBook via the Apple Store.

And we say "dead or alive," we mean it-- Apple will seriously cut you a $700 price break on a brand new 400 MHz PowerBook ($1799 instead of $2499) if you send in a 5300 or 190 in any condition. Even if you send them a fully-working, pristine-looking, fresh-out-of-the box 5300, they will only 1) marvel at how well you've taken care of your precious piece of delicate computer equipment over the years, and then 2) proceed to destroy it through the liberal application of low-grade explosives or some other such means. Apple is actively seeking out these problematic Amelioisms for the sole purpose of getting them off the streets and sending them straight to Silicon Hell. That's how much they'd love to see these things gone.

Which means, if you've got a dead 190 sitting in the back of your closet somewhere, dig it up-- its carcass is worth a small fortune. And if you're still poking along on a PowerBook 5300 which is being held together with duct tape and prayers and last felt reasonably fast sometime during the Carter administration, by all means, send it in and collect your bounty in the form of a FireWire PowerBook for the price of an iBook Special Edition. In fact, since Apple's collecting these things "in any condition," feel perfectly free to whomp the living bejeezus out of your system before you send it in. A few bullet holes or tire tracks won't make any difference to Apple-- those guys are just going to toss the thing into a wood chipper whether it works or not. (While we generally frown on violence to Macs of any kind, we're willing to make an exception for the 5300/190 PowerBooks, which have caused us no end of grief over the years. Go nuts.)

If the idea of a PowerBook 5300 trade-up program sounds familiar, it's probably because, as faithful viewer Jim Weir points out, Apple offered a similar deal a couple of years ago; back then, a used 5300 got you a good deal on a new Wall Street PowerBook G3. As Jim notes, it wasn't long after that promotion ended that Apple unveiled the new Lombard PowerBooks. Apply that data to this new scenario however you may wish. Personally, we choose the obvious interpretation-- new speed-bumped PowerBooks due sometime in September-- but even if that's the case, a 400 MHz PowerBook for $1799 is a ridiculously good deal, no matter what Apple cranks out next. It'd have to have an integrated tricorder and Slurpee dispenser to be a better value than Apple's 5300 bounty deal. Now get digging for those dead PowerBooks!

Maybe it's just us, but frankly, we kind of wish that Apple would stop issuing those annual big-convention press releases stating that "Apple is still number one in the education market." Why? Because the energy the company would save by not repeating that fact might be just enough energy to get Apple acting like the best again. Don't get us wrong-- we're not knocking the Apple Store for Education, or the Apple Learning Solutions, or any of that stuff; it's just that the anecdotal evidence that doesn't come from Apple always seems to indicate that the Mac platform still has a tough fight ahead in the schools.

Case in point: the latest disturbing news from former Mac stalwart Dartmouth College. According to an article in the school's newspaper that got picked up on U-WIRE, "for the first time ever," the majority of the incoming Class of 2004 will be using Windows instead of Macs. Now, it's possible that all we're seeing is the delayed effect of the "Apple's going under any minute now" press of 1996 and 1997, during which everyone in Dartmouth's Class of 2004 was back in high school, and Apple's utter inability to compete on the beige box-makers' home turf (price and game selection, sans style) probably ceded vast chunks of the home market to Wintel. Since Dartmouth's incoming freshpersons were advised to bring "whatever machine they were more comfortable with," having undoubtedly spent the past four years on a PC, the majority of the class opted for Windows. Sad, but (probably) true.

There's another possible explanation for the change, though; last year marked the first time that the school didn't explicitly recommend that everyone in the incoming class buy a Mac. Who knew the students were listening? Here we figured that everyone had attention spans as blissfully short as ours, but evidently evolution's still debating whether "not listening" could be a positive genetic mutation. Wait, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. In any case, isn't it "interesting" that the Mac-to-PC shift among the incoming frosh comes just one year after Dartmouth accepted and installed $450,000 worth of free Windows systems? Okay, so maybe it's not quite as dramatic as the Yalegate scandal, but it's still kinda noteworthy. Our question is, when will Apple return to its primordial roots and start chucking free gear at the schools again?

Think back a few years, when Steve Jobs had just engineered Gilbert Amelio's "sudden departure" from Apple and started acting as "interim CEO" of the company. Do you recall the smell of distrust hanging heavy in the air wherever Mac users gathered for moral support? After all, there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical: Steve's use of a PC laptop instead of a PowerBook manufactured by the very company he was supposed to be saving; his infamous temper and mercurial nature, which got him kicked out of his own company ten years earlier; and perhaps the most distressing of all, the rumor that he had sold every single share of Apple stock he owned except for one-- which he only kept to remain on Apple's board of directors.

What's more, that particular rumor turned out to be 100% true; Steve himself later admitted in an interview that he did in fact dump all of his Apple stock, because at the time he couldn't see things getting any better under the "leadership" of Amelio. We've even heard conspiracy theories that Steve actually dumped his shares just to send the price of AAPL still lower-- a circumstance that he then used to get Gil fired. Regardless, our point is this: when the cofounder of a multibillion-dollar company sells off all his shares but one, that's a pretty universal sign of "things are even worse than you folks out there in TV Land can possibly imagine. Cash out now." Sure, Steve turned the company around and even got handed a slew of new stock options eventually, but the whole stock selloff thing was a huge issue at the time.

That said, let's take a look at a completely unrelated story, shall we? According to Reuters, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen is selling off yet more of his MSFT stock. Since February, the man has sold nearly fifty million shares, totalling about $4.2 billion in cash value. Even more entertaining are the rumors flying that Paul is amassing a ton of money so he can buy one of Microsoft's biggest competitors: the Linux services company Red Hat. Some people might jump to conclusions and surmise that one of the original Microsoft alpha geeks sees no future in Windows and is preparing to jump ship. Now wherever do you suppose they got that idea?