Do you ever wonder what happens to Apple's remaining inventory of existing Macs when a new line gets released? Generally Apple's pretty good at flushing the channel. Heck, with Commander Steve's Iron Veil of Secrecy firmly in place, that's one of the only ways that Apple-watchers can anticipate new hardware introductions; when Apple cuts prices and bleeds the channel dry, chances are there's a refreshed version waiting in the wings. Still, we have to assume that Apple can't ever sell all of the old models before the replacements show up, so what happens to the stragglers? Usually they just wind up marked down still further and sold at fire sale prices, but what if there are so many leftover previous systems, they'd cut heavily into sales of the new products?

We have a sneaking suspicion that Apple faced exactly that problem when the revamped iBooks surfaced this past summer. With some striking new colors, a refined enclosure, faster processors, lower prices, and options like FireWire and DVD-ROM, the new iBooks made the older Blueberry and Tangerine models look... well, not all that attractive anymore. So what happened if Apple had discovered, say, two or three forgotten warehouses full of last year's model that remained unsold? We suppose that the company could cannibalize them for parts, or donate them to local schools, or something like that-- but instead, it appears that Apple found a company willing to take the whole batch off its hands for cheap. Faithful viewer Chris Nolte noticed that Nintendo's latest incarnation of its venerable Game Boy franchise looks hauntingly familiar: take a gander at the upcoming Game Boy Advance and tell us that it doesn't remind you of a certain discontinued consumer laptop we all know and love.

Nintendo game machines that look like Apple consumer systems are nothing new; Nintendo 64 consoles have long come in colors almost identical to Apple's old iMac fruit flavor lineup. But this is the first time we've realized that Nintendo isn't just aping Apple's design sense-- the company is actually buying up unsold Apple inventory and then running them through some sort of ingenious miniaturization machine. Oh, sure, even though Nintendo's page (which happens to be plastered with photos of Blueberry and Tangerine goodness) tries to throw us off with a note about how the "actual system colors are not final and are subject to change," we know the real story. The only circumstance in which Nintendo will switch colors is if the Game Boy Advance is delayed until after the next iBook revision-- in which case we're sure it'll be available in Indigo and Key Lime.