Strange days indeed... say what you will about Steve Jobs, but one thing he's never been accused of doing is selling low-priced products. You'll all recall, for instance, the incredibly high margins on Apple computers back in his first stint with the company. Then he went on to NeXT, where he sold incredibly expensive but impossibly cool black cubic machines that geeks drooled over but few could afford, before moving entirely into the software business, where he sold operating systems with price tags in the thousands. That attitude seemed to travel with him back to Apple, where he eliminated the price-decreasing clone market and showed signs of pushing to raise prices across the board. But now that all shows signs of stopping, as Mac OS Rumors reports that Steve thinks "the days of consumers buying expensive computers is nearly over."

Say what?! That's certainly not the Steve we all know talking. Sure, the G3's showed an incredible price-performance ratio, but most of us assumed it was merely a temporary measure meant to offset Apple's recent financial problems by boosting sales. We at AtAT never dreamed that it was the start of a whole new pricing concept at Apple, whose brand name for years has practically screamed "more expensive, but you get what you pay for." Yet suddenly we have this so-called Steve Jobs now proclaiming that "consumers want computers in the $500 to $700 range." Baffling.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Steve has been abducted by aliens and replaced with an exact replica that is more aware of current market forces than he is. Strangely enough, though, we at AtAT find ourselves inexplicably inclined to give Steve the benefit of the doubt on this one. Could it truly be that little Stevie's all grown up, or are we just more gullible than the average bear? I guess we'll know for sure when and if these alleged $500-700 Apple machines hit the market.

Alas, this week's "Think Disillusioned" hack of an Apple Dalai Lama billboard in Silicon Valley was apparently not the work of prescient extraterrestrials, but rather the handiwork of a group of "eccentric advertising professionals" calling themselves the Billboard Liberation Front. Their press release describes the motives behind the slick-yet-spooky transformation of Apple's logo into a grinning multicolored skull.

The press release is actually a pretty funny bit of satire, poking fun at Apple for its controversial "bold exploitation of these heroes" such as the Dalai Lama, who reportedly received a monetary gift from Apple in exchange for their right to use his image in their ad campaign. Our favorite bit is their quoting Steve Jobs as saying, "If you think Apple's going to pay Chiat-Day for that half-assed Gap-khakis-ripoff-crap, I'm giving you two Gils on the dumb meter." Sounds like the culprits are Mac fans who aren't too impressed with Apple's current campaign.

While we at AtAT are pleased that the hack wasn't just a bunch of bored anti-Mac bigots with a less-than-clear delivery of their message, we're a little disappointed that it wasn't aliens after all. That is, unless this Billboard Liberation Front is just a convenient and ingenious cover story, who has been disguising the true origins of alien billboard restructuring since 1977. Hmmm.

Goodness, things in the Microsoft antitrust world seem to be moving along at quite a clip. Just yesterday we reported that the eleven states who planned to file an antitrust suit against Microsoft had grown to twelve, with the addition of West Virginia. Well, it turns out that those twelve states are actually thirteen, now that Minnesota has jumped on the bandwagon as well. A New York Times article discusses the probable upcoming lawsuit.

Here's the updated list of all states whose attorneys general are in on this expected suit, as far as we can make out: Illinois, Connecticut, South Carolina, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, California, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, West Virginia, Florida and Iowa. (We're pleased to see that the home states of your friendly AtAT staff-- Illinois and Wisconsin-- as well as the state in which AtAT currently has its home office-- Massachusetts-- are all involved.) Thirteen states-- that's 26% of the United States of America, representationally speaking. 27%, if you're only counting the continent. It sounds like anti-Microsoft sentiment continues to grow with each passing day. Of course, not everyone is pleased that the government is targeting Microsoft for anticompetitive behavior, as you can see from this Techweb article, but it's clear that a significant segment of the population feels that Microsoft has overstepped its bounds.

Incidentally, does anyone else find it more than a little ironic that in this ongoing Microsoft vs. the United States government struggle, the U.S. government appears to be cast as the underdog? Er, did we say "ironic?" We meant "scary."