Well, whaddaya know? Occasionally rumors do come true! Most of you probably saw Apple's latest press release trumpeting the fact that .Mac subscribers now number some 180,000 sucke-- er, satisfied customers, which Apple describes as a "phenomenal success." (Is it just us, or are these running subscriber count press releases sounding a little desperate and emotionally needy?) What you may not have noticed is the far more low-key announcement about .Mac pricing for schools.

Try this: keep Apple's emphatic and less-than-a-week-old assurances to MacCentral that "educational institutions would not receive a discounted rate for .Mac subscription services" firmly in mind, and then cast your baby blues/browns/greens/whatevers over to Apple's newly-launched .Mac for Education page. (Warning to rigidly logical artificially sentient computers from a cheesy science fiction universe: you may encounter a paradox, and AtAT cannot be held responsible for any ensuing sparks, smoking, and eventual self-destruction amid your own failing computery voice repeating "CANNOT COMPUTE! CANNOT COMPUTE!!" that exposure to such logical inconsistency may cause. Them's the breaks, you know?)

Yes indeedy do, Apple has caved and announced special .Mac pricing for schools after all: $59 per year (with a cute half-size Mini-iDisk and 33% less mail storage space), provided that schools toss a minimum of ten accounts in the cart when they order. The upshot of this development is twofold. Firstly, it means that schools who chose Macs over Dells because of the value added by 500 free iTools accounts for their students no longer have to pony up $50,000 a year to upgrade said iTools accounts to .Mac subscriptions; now they only need to cough up a paltry thirty grand annually, which, as we all know, most schools can find under the sofa cushions in the teachers' lounge. On top of that, we don't see anything about a first-year discount for upgrading from iTools to .Mac, which implies that, at least for the first year, schools with existing iTools accounts have to pay more than the $49.95 the rest of us have to spend-- but hey, at least they get less storage space, so we guess that makes it all okay.

The second main consequence of Apple's newly-announced .Mac for Education-- and this is the biggie-- is that no one on the planet is ever going to believe a single word Joe Hayashi says ever again for the rest of his life. But then again, he is a director of Product Marketing, and therefore most sane people probably never really listened to him in the first place. So he's probably pretty used to it by now anyway.

Actually, there's a third probable consequence, now that we think about it: Apple's market share in education might continue to sink like a stone now that Macs can no longer even boast free integrated Internet services as a defense against the assault of Dell's far cheaper per-box prices. But obviously Apple has thought of all that and has a Master Plan™ in motion to recapture the education market where it once reigned supreme-- it's just that we mere mortals are too unenlightened to see the broad, graceful strokes of Apple's infallible cosmic design. Right?

Good news for fans of Microsoft Office: now, thanks to a new joint promotion by Apple and those wacky monopolists in Redmond, you can purchase Office v.X for a price that's merely slightly predatory instead of outrageously predatory! Many thanks to faithful viewer Tom in TX for pointing out Apple's new "Office Party" offer, which chops a substantial $300 off of Office's full retail price provided you're a qualified buyer. There's just one teensy little catch: in order to become a "qualified buyer" and save those 300 clams, you're going to have to buy your discounted Office bundled together with a brand spankin' new Mac-- which, of course, will set you back considerably more than the $300 you'd be saving on the Office purchase. But hey, there's no such thing as free money. If there were, we'd be eating it like salad. Mmmmm, cash salad...

Still, if you were already in the market to replace your ancient IIsi anyway (which really deserves to retire, for crying out Pete's sake-- the poor thing just probably celebrated its 650th birthday in computer years, you slave driver) and you like the idea of being able to bring stuff home from the office and work on it without having to mess around with translating file formats and all that junk, then yeah, being able to tack a full copy of Office onto your iMac purchase for an extra $199 is a pretty solid deal. Even we have to admit that Office v.X is probably worth a couple hundred smackers to anyone who plans to do a fair amount of office productivity-type tasks on their new Mac.

See? We're not totally irrationally anti-Microsoft. We even shelled out a hundred bucks for an education copy of Word 5.1 some eight and a half years ago. (Of course, you'd have had to pay us an obscene amount of money to upgrade it to the abominable 6.0, but that's a whole 'nother basket of smelt.)

Noteworthy Detail Number One: while you can't apply the Office Party discount to educational purchases, this offer is valid with the Design Freely promo-- which means if you buy a Power Mac you can get a $200 copy of Office in addition to a totally free copy of the normally $699 InDesign 2.0. That's a whole lotta expensive software for cheap/free. What, no gratis copy of Shake for those of us who don't feel like plunking down an extra five grand for video compositing software? Maybe next time.

Noteworthy Detail Number Two: as you all know, it's pretty simple to get a sense of when Apple plans to release new Macs by examining the end dates of its special promotions. Well, lookee here-- the Office Party discount applies only to purchases made through January 7th, 2003. Seems to us that there's some sort of event or something that just happens to fall on that particular date... Holy cats, it's Macworld Expo! You heard it here first, people, so wake the kids and phone the neighbors: Apple might introduce new Macs at the January Expo! Yessirree, just call us "Scoop" Brady, for this is investigative journalism at its finest. Now where's our Pulitzer?

Speaking of earth-shattering surprises about Macworld Expo, you're really going to want to brace yourselves for this one. Are you sitting down? Have you jammed your wallet into your mouth to keep from swallowing your tongue in case this mind-bending news triggers a grand mal seizure? Is your estate in order, just in case the worst comes to pass? Then you may just possibly be ready to learn that the Expo organizers have officially announced the keynote speaker for this January's festivities, and it's to be none other than-- are you ready for this?-- Steve Jobs. ("We lost the pulse-- charge the paddles to 200... Clear!!")

Now, assuming you're still conscious after that massive shock, we'd just like to take a moment and acknowledge that it's perfectly natural to have been blindsided by such an unexpected announcement. After all, we and the rest of the Mac-using world just naturally assumed that January's keynote duties would fall to either Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer or the new non-Orlando Jones 7 UP guy. To think that the Mac throngs will instead be addressed by Apple's cofounder and once and present CEO, well... let's just say that we never saw it coming.

Still, there's a certain subtle logic to the choice, if you think about it for a little while. As it turns out, Macs are actually made by Apple, so there's a tenuous thematic relevancy right there. On top of that, it seems that Steve Jobs has apparently delivered every single domestic Macworld Expo keynote for the past five years, so perhaps it's not totally out of left field that he'll be doing the one in January as well. Still, it's probably going to take us the whole three months leading up to the keynote to get used to the idea.

By the way, sources report that Jobs was tapped for the gig because the 7 UP guy is scheduled to be taking off his pants in a Mall in Ohio that day (whether this is a professional or a personal appearance is not known at this time), while Mary Kiffmeyer has a manicure appointment that it would be really rude to reschedule. Here's hoping that Jobs has enough Reality Distortion Field energy to win over a crowd of Kiffmeyer fans and 7 UP drinkers-- otherwise things might get really ugly come that fateful Tuesday morning...