We know, we know-- it's old hat to mention Mike Dell's Wacko "Hey, Look, I'm Steve Jobs" Copycat Move O' The Day, and given the increasingly obvious depth of the man's psychosis, it's probably also in pretty poor taste. But heck, we never said we were sensitive to the plights of the ravingly insane. Plus, it's a slow news day, so surely you'll forgive us if we seize the moral low ground and fall back on a classic recurring plot point, right?

So here's the latest... faithful viewer Ryan McGee forwarded us a ZDNet News article about how Dell has a new sales strategy up its sleeve: sell LCD displays instead of CRTs in hopes of "improving margins and lifting PC sales." Remember last year when Apple became the "first in the industry to move to an all LCD flat panel display pro lineup"? Okay, sure, this may be slightly too generic a plan on Dell's part to be an obvious lift from Apple's playbook, but something about the way it's reported just rings too many bells. And we just love how a research firm exec says that this move "helps to differentiate [Dell] from [its] competitors." Yeah, moving to LCDs just differentiates Dell from Apple like crazy.

Oh, and this is rich: the same guy who sees Dell's newfound emphasis on LCDs as a terrific differentiating factor also "wouldn't be surprised to see rivals such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Compaq" copying Dell and moving to flat-panel displays themselves. So now instead of the rest of the industry following in Apple's trailblazing footsteps, apparently now it's Dell leading the way. Priceless. We can't wait until Dell invents an LCD connected to a CPU base unit with a positionable jointed arm and everyone else scrambles to copy it. After all, Dell was the first to integrate wireless networking antennas into laptops, right?

To be fair, we should mention that Dell's new LCD is a 19-inch model-- something that we bet a lot of Mac users wouldn't mind seeing in Apple's lineup to fill in the $1500 gap between the $999 17-incher and the $2499 22-inch Cinema Display. And we should also point out that, according to the article, Dell's model is "targeted at people, such as stock traders, who are looking for a sleek, low-power consuming screen." Don't ask us why stock traders are apparently particularly hot on sleekness and low power consumption; if we knew, our portfolio probably wouldn't be in the toilet right about now. But maybe Apple should steal a play right back from Dell and quit pitching the Cinema Display to creative professionals; if Dell's right, it's the reckless day-traders that'll really like this thing...