Will the life-improving wonders of the Mac never cease? You already know that owning an iMac in a flavor matched to your personal aura and operating it on a schedule attuned to your natural biorhythms can reduce stress, improve your mental health, and promote a general sense of oneness with the Universe. But did you know that the Mac can also be an effective aid in the struggle to stop smoking? 'Strue. C'mon, would we lie to you?

Okay, we sense skepticism out there. But here's the scoop: my sister Lisa has been a Mac user for maybe five years now-- and a smoker for almost twenty. She was introduced to her first Mac when she bought a friend's old LC III to supplement her ancient 286 laptop. Since then, she's been squeezing every last drop of use out of that 68030-based Mac-- sending email, surfing the Web, playing goofy shareware games, and even doing layout for a nonprofit newspaper in Pagemaker. (Yes, we said it's an LC III. Crazy, huh?) Well, finally her needs far outstripped what that earnest but tired old Mac could do, and a week ago she bought a standard Blueberry iMac. Predictably, the speed increase blew her away, but it was the iMac's feng shui that led to an unexpected health benefit. "The iMac is still in my bedroom," she wrote, "and I don't smoke in the bedroom, so it's actually improving my health."

There you have it, plain and simple. The lure of the iMac is such that its beautiful and inviting nature overwhelms any other impulse; by placing it in a no-smoking zone, you've got a deterrent more effective than electroshock aversion therapy. Once your body has associated smoking with being deprived of the iMac's cheerful company, those nicotine cravings will fade-- it's a drug-free quitting strategy, and besides, the iMac is more lickable than any nicotine patch. Plus, we bet this phenomenon could be used to battle all kinds of addiction. We foresee a creative variety of progressive addiction treatment programs: fruit-flavored needle exchanges, a state-of-the-art iMac lab in the Betty Ford Clinic, custom-engineered iBooks that monitor the user's bloodstream and shut down when controlled substances are detected, etc. Of course, then we'll have a society rampant with Mac addiction, but everyone knows there's no cure for that.