Remember last May, when Apple replaced all of its stylish-yet-clunky CRT displays with stylish-and-sleek LCD models? At the time, Uncle Steve announced that Apple had become "the first company to move to an all LCD flat panel display lineup." As it turned out, of course, that was a teensy bit of an exaggeration, because even though it's His Steveness we're talking about, here, just saying it don't make it so. Sure, all of Apple's standalone displays were (and are) LCD-based, but the iMac was still stuck with a cathode ray tube, bless its lumpy little heart.

But now that the new iMac boasts a 15-inch LCD panel mounted on a mirror-finish chrome arm (side note: now we finally know why the back of the iPod is so shiny, and it's not just to distract those of us with short attention spans), surely Apple has finally severed all ties to the CRT for good, right? Heck, we've even got a nice new Steve quote to prove it: "The CRT display is now officially dead." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Unfortunately, Steve's criteria for something to be pronounced "officially dead" are evidently pretty lax, because as you may have noticed, a quick trip to the Apple Store confirms that in addition to "the new iMac," as it's listed there, the CRT-based plain ol' "iMac" is still being sold. You can still scoop up the bare-bones Indigo model for $799, and what used to be the $1299 one is apparently now being offered for $999. And the way we see it, this isn't just an inventory clearance, because Apple took at least four seconds to ensure that the "classic" iMac now has its own special URL at http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/.

It seems to us that the CRT is therefore just "mostly dead" as far as Apple is concerned, and while we know some of you are anxious to be rid of those heavy, bulky, hot, radiation-spewing suckers as soon as possible, there's a good reason to keep them around for a while, and it's not just to raise the ambient room temperature a few extra degrees. If you're anything like us (and heaven help you if you are), you may have experienced a slight panic attack on Monday when Steve revealed that the low-end new iMac has a sticker price of $1299. In this economy, that might well have been the kiss of death for any hopes Apple had of taking the consumer market by storm. We'll sleep a lot easier knowing that there's still a pair of sub-$1000 Macs out there to fulfill the needs of the financially challenged... or, better yet, to lure them unsuspecting into the store thirty minutes before they walk out with a dazed look on their faces, a $1299 LCD model, and more debt than can be reasonably managed.

Attention, all bitter Mac purists still huddled in a corner over an SE/30 using MacWrite and an ImageWriter to crank out vituperative manifestoes about how we need to wrest control back from the NeXTies who took over Apple and ran roughshod over the One True Macintosh Experience: we have what might constitute good news for you. Now, don't get too excited-- Apple hasn't capitulated and recrafted Mac OS X to conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, nor has the company seen the light and admitted that filename extensions are an inherently morally offensive way to track file metadata. And no, the rainbow Apple logo isn't back, either.

On the plus side, though, faithful viewer Edward Liu tells us that Apple has appointed a new "vice president of Software Technology" to report to Avie Tevanian-- and that according to the official press release, that new veep is none other than Dr. Guy (Bud) Tribble. For those of you unfamiliar with that fascinatingly personable name, Doc Tribble was the manager of the "original Macintosh Software team" and he "helped to design the Mac OS and user interface" back in the olden days. He has presumably also heard more annoying Star Trek jokes about furry cooing grain-eating earmuffs than most mere mortals could endure without offing themselves, so he's clearly a man of formidable mental stamina as well.

Tribble has returned to Apple from Eazel, one of the more well-known companies that went bust trying to bring Linux to the masses by grafting a decent user interface on top of the command line. Seeing as Apple has mostly attained that holy grail in Mac OS X, we figure this was a natural career progression. The good news for Mac purists, obviously, is that in his new role of "helping define the software engineering group's technical direction," Bud might see fit to put some more Mac back in Mac OS X. Of course, if you're going to grasp at that straw, you might have to find a way to ignore the fact that the guy was also the original veep of Software Engineering at NeXT, where he was a "key architect of the NextStep operating system" upon which Mac OS X is based and from where many of the operating system's unMacisms originated. But we're sure you can do it if you try real hard.

In any case, we hope that Mac users of all creeds and levels of fanaticism will welcome Bud back into the fold; we're sure that, arguments of "Mac-like" versus "NeXT-like" aside, he'll be a valuable force in making Mac OS X even better. Therefore, we should all do what we can to make Bud feel as comfortable as possible in his new role-- so here at AtAT, we hereby pledge to help by laying off the lame Tribble gags. Maybe.

Reason number twelve why Microsoft is so massively successful, money-wise: even though the company has enough cash lying around to purchase Switzerland in one easy payment, it still knows how to be frugal when it comes to marketing expenses. The Redmond Beast may have blown $200 million on the Windows XP ad blitz, it may be willing to flush a cool billion over the next five years on the loss-leading Xbox just to stomp all over Sony and Nintendo, but when a cheap alternative will suffice, Microsoft knows how to pinch a penny until it bleeds.

Example: faithful viewer Andre Nantel forwarded us an entertaining little article by ZDNet UK, who claims that Microsoft rigged on online poll to make it appear that its own .NET architecture is already way more popular than Java among developers building web services. Last month the poll showed Java clearly in the lead, but suddenly a whole slew of pro-.NET votes started flooding in. So did .NET suddenly catch on like wildfire in among the web development community in the past three weeks? Not hardly.

See, ZDNet UK's examination of its log files reveals that a "very high percentage of voters" clocked in from within the microsoft.com domain, many of whom arrived at the poll via an email message with a subject of "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR .NET!" (Yes, evidently if you click a link within an email message in Microsoft's corporate mail system, Exchange passes the message's sender and subject line along to the web server. Privacy, shmivacy.) What's more, several people tried to vote multiple times, including one Microsoftian genius who apparently attempted to vote 228 times before his or her brainstem processed the fact that multiple votes weren't being counted. "Clear evidence" of automated vote attempts was also uncovered.

Now, we're not going to pretend for a second that AtAT doesn't engage in precisely the same type of behavior by telling you folks to go stuff the ballots at various Apple-related online polls; however, we think you'll agree that there's a slight difference in scale between a company with a $370 billion market cap (trying to push its own product, too) and a rinky-dink soap opera whose staff members occasionally get really excited when they find a quarter while rummaging around behind the sofa cushions for the TiVo remote. But heck, what's a little ballot-stuffing between friends? All we want to know is whether we're entitled to royalties now that Microsoft has adopted our motto of "Vote Early, Vote Often!"...