Heads up, people-- it's Friday the 13th, and you all know what that means: tomorrow is Saturday the 14th! Stay indoors, drink plenty of fluids, and avoid speaking aloud any words that contain the letter "E." But there's some good news, too; as faithful viewer Phil Pickering was kind enough to point out, Apple is taking steps to counteract its current sales slump by introducing a new mail-in rebate offer, effective immediately: buy a PowerBook by the end of the year and get $200 back, or purchase a Cube and any Apple display and get $300 instead. Such a deal!

Now, in addition to just being a pair of rip-roaring promotions, each of these deals provides fuel for speculation about Apple's product lines. Let's take the "Square Deal" Cube offer first. We already knew that Apple's gorgeous experiment in high-fashion premium computing wasn't selling terribly well, hence the earnings report which blamed Apple's woes in part on slow sales of the Cube. The fact is, even though your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff slavers like Pavlov's dogs every time we hear the opening chords to "Purple Haze," even we have to admit that $1799 is a bit too pricey for the Cube to reach its audience. An entry-level Power Mac G4 is lots more expandable, only slightly slower, and a full $200 cheaper; it's tough to spend the extra bucks just for the Cube's style. Maybe if the Power Mac G4 was some boxy beige thing we'd have an easier time justifying the leap to a Cube, but let's face it-- the standard Power Mac is a thing of beauty in its own right.

But with the $300 rebate, suddenly the net price of a basic Cube drops to $1499-- less than an entry-level Power Mac, which it actually beats in performance by 50 MHz. Now it's a whole new ball game. And as for the requirement that you buy an Apple display with the Cube to qualify for the rebate, well, personally we can't imagine buying a Cube without a cool new matching monitor. Hooking a Cube up to our old, beige NEC multisync would be a crime against fashion. So hopefully this new rebate will get fence-sitters off their butts and into the stores, mold lines or no mold lines.

As for the PowerBook deal, well, that's pretty revealing, isn't it? First of all it shows that the Cube isn't the only slow-running horse in Apple's stable. It's tough to imagine that PowerBook sales wouldn't have tapered off considerably once the new iBooks shipped a while back; an iBook Special Edition, with its faster processor, new DVD-ROM drive, FireWire port, and composite video-out capabilities, suddenly looked a whole lot more attractive than ponying up the extra $700 for a full-fledged PowerBook. The rebate now brings the differential down to $500-- still sketchy, but hopefully it'll keep PowerBook sales from bottoming out completely. By the way, did you notice that this promotion runs through the end of the year? We think that's a pretty safe indication that we won't be seeing any new models-- G4 or not-- before January's Macworld Expo. So if you're in the market for a pro laptop, now's the time to buy.