We here at AtAT firmly believe that it's never too late to better oneself; on that note, allow us to share with you our two big New Year's Resolutions. First of all, we hereby resolve to get things done on time and never to procrastinate. Come to think of it, though, the fact that we're making this resolution in September instead of last January means we can pretty much write that one off as having been stomped into oblivion nine months ago. Oh, well. Instead we'll just focus with laser-like precision on sticking to our second resolution, which is not to make any more cheap shots about Mike Dell copying Apple's every move. This we resolve, and our determination is as strong as steel.

What's that? He's at it again? Aw, nuts. To paraphrase McCroskey from AirPlane!, looks like we picked the wrong week to stop skewering Mikey.

Yes, that's yet another resolution out the window, because there's simply no way we could resist commenting on Dell's latest "innovation" without causing ourselves some sort of massive brain hemorrhage, and if you don't have your health, what do you have? Faithful viewer William Bonde reports that Dell has just introduced the Dimension 8200, a Wintel box that Dell describes in a press release as featuring "a bold new chassis design... with an emphasis on customers' needs for performance, style, expansion and ease-of-access." See, this new enclosure "opens like a clamshell and without tools, making it quicker and easier to access internal components." Gee, where have we seen that before?

For those of you keeping score, Apple's current easy-open chassis debuted way back in January of 1999 with the arrival of the blue and white Power Mac G3, so Mike was a little slow to "borrow" that feature; he was even slower if you count the Power Mac 9600 and the beige minitower G3 as evolutionary stops on Apple's road to easy-access nirvana. It's worth noting that Dell took a stab at the whole "no tools, easy-open chassis" almost exactly a year ago with the Optiplex 150, though that was an under-the-monitor desktop enclosure; it's taken Mike and his team of designers twelve more months to make the jump to a tower model. (Back then, switching from beige to a far more daring grey was the real way that Dell was pushing the envelope.)

By the way, William has actually used the new Dimension 8200, and he notes that while Dell may have copied the concept of the easy-open enclosure, apparently the execution leaves something to be desired. Reportedly "you have to hold two large buttons in on the top and bottom, which partially defeats the purpose because you have to lift it up and turn it to get to it." So in other words, you don't need any tools, but an extra hand or three sounds like it might be useful. It's nice to hear that progress just keeps marching right along, isn't it?