Well, it may not be the move that recaptures the Education crown, but it's a healthy step in the right direction: a sweet deal on a "special college bundle" designed to help you "take the dorms by storm." Therefore, if you're heading off to college in the fall, this may be the perfect time to score a new Mac so you can spend the summer "breaking it in" before you have to rely on it for crucial homework-related tasks. (Industry experts agree that new computer equipment operates at its peak after having logged a minimum of 300 hours of "burn-in," best performed by running resource-hungry applications for long periods of time. We recommend Deus Ex.)

Here's how it works: buy any Mac through Apple's education channel before July 8th, shell out an extra $199, and you'll get a bonus 128 MB of RAM, an Epson 777i color inkjet printer, a USB cable, and-- here's the sweet spot-- a "free" Rio 600 portable MP3 player. Seeing as the Rio is fully compatible with iTunes, you'll have a convenient and discreet method to take some music with you to class so you'll have something to listen to other than the professor's lecture. Once more, Apple proves that it does know its audience.

Granted, this isn't the most earth-shattering of deals; the individual components of the bundle probably wouldn't cost more than a hundred bucks more than the bundle itself if you bought them separately. However, since we still retain vivid college memories of trying to find enough loose change behind the bookshelf to score an 89-cent frozen burrito from the local grocery store, it's probably wise to keep that extra hundred simoleons in perspective. Better yet, despite the reference to dorms, it's not just the college-bound who can get in on this deal; it seems to apply to any individual education Mac purchase at all. That means you teachers out there can finally replace that ancient LCIII and score a Rio in the process; if you have to grade papers, you may as well groove while you're at it.