If you're familiar with the retail relationship between Apple and Sears, you know that, historically speaking, it's been spotty at best-- if by "spotty" you mean "like a train wreck and you can't look away." Sears was one of the national resellers that got axed back when Uncle Steve was cleaning house; while it was nice that potential customers could stop in at just about any mall in America and check out a Performa, it wasn't so nice that those Performas were generally off, crashed, mouseless, covered in graffiti, or on fire. The Sears method of selling Macs was apparently to set up a display model and then covertly invite the local Ritalin kids and gang members to deface the Mac as much as humanly possible while the store personnel studiously ignores all such activity.

So Sears was out, and didn't much care, since they rarely sold any Macs anyway. (Gee, we wonder why?) But then the iMac changed everything. Suddenly Apple had a bona fide hit on its hands, and Sears wanted a piece of that action; likewise, Apple had to admit that having iMacs on display in every Sears store would do great things for the product's visibility-- provided, of course, that the display iMacs hadn't been smashed in with a claw hammer and then melted into a blackened glob by means of an acetylene torch. Eventually a deal got hammered out. Sears promised to behave, and last June the chain returned to the Mac fold, selling iMacs (and eventually iBooks).

But do you remember what happened when Best Buy sold Macs poorly, got ditched by Apple, and came crawling back to get a slice of the iMac pie? One word: Hindenburg. Some retailers just never change their spots, and concerns over stocking multiple flavors of Apple's candy-colored space egg (not to mention a sales force that would seemingly rather bleed from the eye sockets than actually sell a Mac) led to Best Buy's return to "No Macs Here" status. Oh, the humanity.

Guess what? At least at our local store, Sears hasn't changed much, either. The display model iMacs and iBooks are always trashed (recently the iBook was missing every single key from its keyboard), the store "help" are masters in the field of active avoidance, and the prices are typically even $100 higher than Apple's. So it came as no particular surprise to us when we received an anonymous and unverified report that Apple is pulling back out of Sears as of the end of May. Remember, folks, at this point we have to classify this news as purely unsubstantiated rumor-- we rarely hear things first, so we're a mite skeptical-- but we have to ask ourselves, if Apple isn't ditching Sears, why the heck not?

Could it really be true? Has the Cube officially reached the end of its line? Nobody questions the fact that, while it's piled up a ridiculous number of awards and rave reviews, the Cube is the computer that everybody loves but woefully few people actually want to buy. Underwhelming Cube sales contributed significantly to Apple's recent quarterly loss. First Apple heaped on rebates in hopes of bringing Cube sales to critical mass, and when that didn't work, the price was slashed in January. When even that proved not to be enough, the Cube's sticker price was hacked down again last month, with a low-end model costing just $1299-- a full $500 (or 27%) lower than the price point at which it debuted only eight short months ago.

Unfortunately, it seems that neither price cuts nor new features like internal CD-RW drives and nVIDIA graphics cards could turn the Cube into a commercially successful product. We had always assumed that since the Cube was obviously Steve's pet project (even more so than the iMac, we'd wager), it'd always be around, whether it made money or not. Alas, we may have been wrong, and evidently Steve is exercising some measure of financial responsibility; as faithful viewer The Amazing Llama pointed out, MacUser can "exclusively reveal that Apple's Cube development team has been dissolved." It the reports are true, then the twenty-five visionaries who brought us the Brain in a Box have indeed been torn asunder; some are now working on other projects, and others were flat-out laid off.

But wait-- what's this? MacUser claims that despite the development team being scattered (thus dashing any hopes of a redesigned Cube 2), Apple does plan to keep selling the current design-- and periodically upgrading the same chassis with "faster processors and bigger storage devices." So the Cube lives on... maybe. The same article claims that Cubes proved so utterly unsellable at retail that Apple actually had to buy back three million dollars' worth of the wacky little devices from CompUSA, who apparently found the critters less popular at the checkout counter than lint brushes at a nudist colony. Maybe we're underestimating Steve's willingness to bleed for art, but if the Cube is selling so poorly that Apple has to buy them back from resellers, we can't imagine that it'll stay in the product line-up for much longer.

If anything separates Apple from the rest of the computer industry (other than startling attention to detail, a real concern for the user experience, and the ability to treat design as something other than an afterthought), it'd have to be fashion. Certainly since the first iMac made its Bondi Blue waves, the rest of the box-makers have been playing catch-up-- at least as far as looks are concerned. That's not to say that some of Apple's more daring visual experiments aren't a little questionable; the jury's still out on whether we, as a community, should consider "Flower Power" a Fashion Do or a Fashion Don't. But even as that debate rages on, Apple's softer, saner, default iMac hue just racked up an award.

It's true, people; according to Macworld, the International Color Committee has named Indigo the "color of the year." Who cares, you ask? Well, to a certain extent, you should, since the ICC decides what colors you'll have to choose from when random consumer goods show up on store shelves. Delegates from the US, the UK, Japan, Italy, and Germany have banded together to crown Indigo as the reigning Hue King, and thus you can expect a whole lot of muted blue stuff to surface over the next couple of years. If you're in the mood for some truly over-the-top analysis you should be aware that the editor of Viewpoint magazine has gone so far as to call Indigo the new white; it'll be everywhere this decade, contributing to a "blue minimalism." And that's good, see, because Indigo is "like the moment dawn breaks. That moment of translucency like an Indigo that's back-lit."

Bro-ther. Okay, yeah, maybe Mr. Viewpoint is laying it on a little thick, but still, we're happy to see that once again Apple is ahead of the fashion curve; the Indigo iMacs first strutted their stuff on the runway last July, and now they're the hippest thing out there, color-wise. We only see one downside to that fact; does this mean that in a year everything from cars to swimwear to coffeemakers and the kitchen sink is going to be Flower Power? Because we're not sure we could handle something like that...