Remember last May, when Apple replaced all of its stylish-yet-clunky CRT displays with stylish-and-sleek LCD models? At the time, Uncle Steve announced that Apple had become "the first company to move to an all LCD flat panel display lineup." As it turned out, of course, that was a teensy bit of an exaggeration, because even though it's His Steveness we're talking about, here, just saying it don't make it so. Sure, all of Apple's standalone displays were (and are) LCD-based, but the iMac was still stuck with a cathode ray tube, bless its lumpy little heart.

But now that the new iMac boasts a 15-inch LCD panel mounted on a mirror-finish chrome arm (side note: now we finally know why the back of the iPod is so shiny, and it's not just to distract those of us with short attention spans), surely Apple has finally severed all ties to the CRT for good, right? Heck, we've even got a nice new Steve quote to prove it: "The CRT display is now officially dead." It doesn't get much clearer than that.

Unfortunately, Steve's criteria for something to be pronounced "officially dead" are evidently pretty lax, because as you may have noticed, a quick trip to the Apple Store confirms that in addition to "the new iMac," as it's listed there, the CRT-based plain ol' "iMac" is still being sold. You can still scoop up the bare-bones Indigo model for $799, and what used to be the $1299 one is apparently now being offered for $999. And the way we see it, this isn't just an inventory clearance, because Apple took at least four seconds to ensure that the "classic" iMac now has its own special URL at http://www.apple.com/imac/g3/.

It seems to us that the CRT is therefore just "mostly dead" as far as Apple is concerned, and while we know some of you are anxious to be rid of those heavy, bulky, hot, radiation-spewing suckers as soon as possible, there's a good reason to keep them around for a while, and it's not just to raise the ambient room temperature a few extra degrees. If you're anything like us (and heaven help you if you are), you may have experienced a slight panic attack on Monday when Steve revealed that the low-end new iMac has a sticker price of $1299. In this economy, that might well have been the kiss of death for any hopes Apple had of taking the consumer market by storm. We'll sleep a lot easier knowing that there's still a pair of sub-$1000 Macs out there to fulfill the needs of the financially challenged... or, better yet, to lure them unsuspecting into the store thirty minutes before they walk out with a dazed look on their faces, a $1299 LCD model, and more debt than can be reasonably managed.