Gee, and for a brief shining moment we thought Christmas had come early this year: faithful viewer Mav breathlessly informed us that a new promo graphic had popped up in the rotation on the Apple Store home page, touting the latest Power Mac G5 lineup with pricing that was too good to be true: the entry-level 1.6 GHz model, which had just dropped from $1999 to $1799 a week ago, had dropped again to $1599; the new dual-1.8 GHz config, which debuted a week ago at $2499, had already slid to $2299; and the Big Kahuna, the dual-2.0 GHz unit, had dipped from $2999 all the way down to $2699. Break out the nog; stocking stuffers for everyone!

Of course, the only problem here is that anything that's "too good to be true" is, by definition, kindasorta false. If you actually click on the promo, you're taken to the Power Mac G5 selection page, where last week's new pricing is, unsurprisingly, still in effect. (No, Virginia, there aren't two price drops in the span of a week.) And yet there was that big ol' promo graphic, sitting plain as day on the Apple Store home page-- Apple has since fixed the pricing anomaly, and you can see the corrected version here, but until early this afternoon that graphic showed much lower pricing. So what's the what? Could this be another example of Apple's Web Gnomes accidentally leaking a big secret a few days too early?

It's possible, we suppose; while two price drops in a week would be pretty unheard of, since the holiday shopping season officially kicks into hyperdrive this Friday, we guess that a Power Mac price drop then isn't totally out of the question. For a while we were utterly convinced that the incorrect pricing was just a simple and meaningless file-linking error; MacMinute pointed out that the reduced prices in the graphic "match Apple's educational pricing," and MacRumors noted that the image is "essentially the same as the educational store image." The key word there, though, is "essentially"-- they're not the same image, since the text colors are swapped in the price listing, and the education image's name ("cp_promo_top_dual1_8_g5_edu.jpg") clearly indicates that it's for education sales only.

If the two graphics were actually the exact same image or the same file on the server, we'd agree in a heartbeat that there's no basis for speculating about anything more than how the Web Gnome who screwed up this time will be "corrected" (our money's on "doused in HP Fruity and fed to a peckish Komodo dragon"), but the fact is that the two images were different pictures in different files with different (and descriptive) names. So maybe there's something more to all this than just a meaningless mistake.

For instance, could the Mystery Graphic™ have been created before last week's announcement on the 18th, revealing the line-up's original planned pricing before a last-minute boost? Maybe; its filename-- "cp_promo_top_g5_112103.jpg"-- implies that it was either created on the 21st (after the final pricing had been made public), or intended to be shown on the 21st. That was a Friday, which isn't a traditional "New Apple Stuff" day, but it's not impossible. Of course, if it was created on the 21st, then hey, maybe there is a holiday price drop right around the corner.

Yeah, and maybe Ballmers will fly out of our [insert plural form of a bodily orifice that won't jeopardize our PG rating here]. Sadly, the simplest and likeliest scenario is that a Graphic Gnome simply mistook the educational pricing for standard pricing when he or she was tasked with creating the image. Darn that Occam's razor! Think of all the neat stuff that could happen if the guy would just grow a frickin' beard already.

As for the way that Apple's various gnomes seem to keep making little (and not-so-little) mistakes all the time, we think it might be time to bail on them altogether and start hiring full-fledged elves, instead. Sure, they cost a little more, but you get what you pay for. Santa seems to do okay.

Meanwhile, the Apple Store's not the only thing that apparently experienced "technical difficulties" this morning; faithful viewer Danny Cohen was just the first of many to inform us that the iTunes Music Store had gone a little crazy, too. Reportedly all the song links were completely hosed, so that clicking on, for example, "Alice Cooper" would bring up the page for "Clay Aiken" instead. Well, okay, maybe that wasn't such a good example, since Alice and Clay are actually the same person, but you get the point: it's fixed now, but for hours the iTMS was in a state of utter chaos. So: wrong pricing promoted at the Apple Store, the iTMS in shambles... what could possibly have brought about such pandemonium at One Infinite Loop?

The answer will chill you to the very depths of your soul: Apple employees are shaky right now because they're coping with news of their imminent demise!

No kidding! Faithful viewer Lani Moo tipped us off to new article in TechNewsWorld by the Criswell of our generation, analyst and frequent AtAT guest star Rob Enderle. Yes, folks, Rob's at it again, but this time, instead of predicting Apple's switch to Intel processors by the end of 2003, he's just flat-out predicting Apple's doom-- presumably because Apple still hasn't gone x86 (and 2003 is almost over-- good lord, he was right!!).

Actually, though, to be perfectly accurate, this time Enderle's just the messenger: the actual prediction of Apple's doom comes from a panel of know-it-alls at Comdex last week. Enderle, who was moderating (gosh, what an astonishing coincidence), asked the panel which companies "would be dead... in the future," and the answer wasn't good: Sun, Novell... and Apple.

Of course, before you go stick your head in the microwave, there are a few mitigating factors to consider, here. For one thing, the panel consisted entirely of four bigwigs from Microsoft, Oracle, Apache, and the Yankee Group, and frankly, we can't think of a single reason to believe that any of those particular entities has any insight whatsoever into why Apple is still around in the first place. (On a side note, with Microsoft representatives publicly predicting Apple's death, are we really supposed to believe that the company is planning to keep developing Office-- or anything else-- for our platform? Puh-leaze.) All four panelists felt that it was "a given" that any company that "didn't run on the x86 architecture" is "likely gone." In other words, that panel was about as corporate-IT as it gets, and the odds that anyone on it "gets" why Apple keeps making money and generating fierce customer loyalty are next to nil. Throw Enderle into the mix and you've got five peas in a very beige pod.

Lastly, even if the panelists are correct, Enderle reports that he merely asked the panel to list the companies that would die "in the future"; apparently he didn't set a date. So Apple may well have another five billion years of life left in it-- more, if it gets its space ark done before the sun goes nova.

Listen, we've been hearing "experts" predict Apple's impending doom for the entire past decade, and we bet the doomsaying goes back even farther than that. We actually wish Enderle had asked which companies would be gone in, say, twenty years; we'd have made a friendly wager with him that Apple would still be around come November 2023, and the loser would buy the winner one of those flying cars that'll be all the rage that year. We can always use another free flying car.

Remember when Maine took education computing to a whole new level by providing iBooks to every junior high school student in the state? Well, bad news, folks: just when it looked like the education tables were really starting to turn in Apple's favor, the company missed its shot to put iBooks in the hands of all 130,000 sixth graders across the entire state of Michigan. Instead, according to an Associated Press article, state officials "are recommending Hewlett-Packard Co. to provide laptop computers and other technical services" for the state's "Freedom to Learn" program.

And what makes the loss particularly galling is that the pilot program upon which Michigan based its decision to launch such a monstrous undertaking used iBooks. That's right; "the smaller pilot project used Apple Computer and awarded technology grants to 10,000 students at 146 schools" last year. So let's see, here... Michigan tests the waters with iBooks and finds that, oh boy, the whole one-to-one wireless notebook idea works splendidly! Then, when it's ready to scale the program up by more than an order of magnitude, it blithely decides that it's going to go with HP notebooks instead of iBooks, because really, how different could the user experience and support issues possibly be?

Does anyone else hear the Three Stooges music playing in the background?

All we can say is, Michigan may well be in for a world of hurt when it eventually discovers that it just introduced a layer of complexity and pain it never bargained for. But do you want to know how HP beat Apple to this sweet deal? Get this: Michigan passed on sticking with iBooks because HP "agreed to charge no more than $275 per student per year." $275?! Sheesh, talk about lowballing a bid. This is for laptops, mind you. HP's cheapest laptop is $724 (and that's only after rebates). And sure, that $275 is "per year," but even if the plan is to make HP's cheapest laptops last for three years, considering that HP also has to provide "technical support, insurance, and training"-- as well as wireless networking equipment, we expect-- that $275 a year isn't going to go very far. Oh, and since Michigan is already planning to siphon $22 million out of its $39 million laptop fund to cover a state budget shortfall, well...

We'd love for Apple to have won this bid, no question, but not at a price that's just going to wind up costing the company buckets of cash. Yes, we know Apple has buckets of cash to spare, but it already has the Maine initiative as a selling point; Michigan would only have been gravy, and really expensive gravy at that. Here's hoping that Apple wins more big education deals, but not if they're just going to be money pits.

Oh, and the other bright spot? Dell didn't win this one either.