When Steve Jobs returned to Apple a few years back, the product list was a mess. There were eight kazillion products and they were all named with cryptic numbers that were meaningless unless you owned the secret decoder ring. For instance, is a Power Mac 8500 better than a 7600? Depends on what you mean by "better"; the 8x00 series was a minitower configuration and the 7x00 series had a desktop enclosure, but who would ever know that a priori? Uninformed customers would likely assume that an 8500 was faster than a 7600, which wasn't necessarily the case-- they both had 604 chips, but the early 8500 ran at 120 MHz while the 7600 ran at 132 MHz. Heck, you couldn't even assume that higher numbers in the same product line indicated faster or newer computers: the 7300 came out after the 7600, and ran at 180 or 200 MHz. Jane, stop this crazy thing!

We much prefer the current product list of four lines: a consumer desktop (iMac), a consumer laptop (iBook), a pro desktop (Power Mac), and a pro laptop (PowerBook). It's simple, elegant, consistent, and there are no goofy numbers, other than the clock speed of the particular model. There's only one problem: a slight lack of choice. You may have noticed this yourself. Let's say you want a Mac portable. Well, you have to choose between the iBook and the PowerBook. But say the iBook is perfect with one small exception: you need a video-out port, and the USB adapters on the market aren't fast enough for your purposes. Well, now your only choice is a big, expensive PowerBook-- whose 14" screen, FireWire ports, card slots, and faster processor may all be serious overkill for you. Plus, maybe you really had your heart set on Tangerine. Choice and flexibility are the sacrifices Apple made for the sake of tightening up the product lines; we think it was the right move, but a little more choice might be nice.

Here's another classic example: the iMac. Perhaps the $999 one does everything you need it to do; it's plenty fast for your purposes, you don't need FireWire or DVD-ROM, and you don't need any slots or bays for expansion. You even like Blueberry. But you do want a bigger monitor because you like to putter around with graphics and layout, or maybe you feel that playing games on a 15" screen just doesn't cut it. Well, unless you want to use the iMac's monitor-out port and put a second monitor next to the iMac itself, now you're looking at a G4-- whose base price is $600 more than an entry-level iMac, and then you've still got to buy a monitor. You're caught between a rock and a hard place. A hard, expensive place.

If you've been bitten by the above scenario, you might be interested in the dirt that Mac OS Rumors is dishing. It's rumored that Apple is considering a monitorless iMac-- a teeny little desktop unit with a video port so customers can hook it up to whatever monitor they damn well please. That might shut up the constant whining about how the iMac's screen is too small; and at a $699 price point, you could pick up a 17"-iMac bundle from Apple for about $1200. The Apple Store could even give price cuts to people who order a monitorless iMac (hmmm, should we call it an itsyMac?) together with a Studio Display. It's crazy enough to work.

The truly ironic scenario, of course, would be if Compaq wound up suing Apple for trade dress violation. You've probably seen commercials for the iPaq, Compaq's iMac ripoff in name, if not in style. The "legacy-free" iPaq's specs may sound a bit familiar: no slots, no drive bays-- nothing but USB ports, a network connector, and sound jacks, plus a VGA port. So imagine the hubbub if Apple released an itsyMac that's roughly the same thing, only a Mac. Would Compaq's lawyers have the chutzpah to file suit?