Well, we'll certainly say one thing about the Honorable Mr. Jobs: the man clearly has guts, and we don't mean he keeps assorted viscera cooling in a bucket in the corner of his living room. (He might, actually, but that's beside the point.) Given that the price of computer equipment is supposed to go down, not up, who else would get up in front of six thousand customers and announce that he's tacking another hundred bucks onto the sticker price of his company's hottest product? Mere mortal CEOs would only do such a thing live via satellite for fear of immediate retaliation by disgruntled audience members packing heat; heck, even a Kevlar black turtleneck isn't much protection from a head shot, and Steve's head is big enough to make an easy target for even the most casual marksman. Like we said, the man has guts-- and the fact that they're still pumping away inside his abdominal cavity following that little keynote stunt speaks volumes about the powers of the Reality Distortion Field.

For those who may have missed the skinny, you can check out Apple's official press release, which does its best to spin the "good news, bad news" game to the company's advantage: the headline, in large print, boldly proclaims, "Apple in Volume Production of New iMacs." (Yay!) Unfortunately, the finer print immediately adds that there's also a "$100 Price Increase Due To Rising Component Costs." (Boo!) So while Apple has shipped "more than 125,000" new iMacs in the past two months (more than many analysts had come to expect) and is now churning out "over 5,000 new iMacs per day," unless you already had your system on order, you can expect to fork over $1399/$1599/$1899 instead of the original $1299/$1499/$1799 that lots of Grumpy Guses were already calling "too expensive." Seeing as Apple plans to honor all existing preorders at the original price, this marks one of those rare occasions when the early adopters actually wound up getting a better deal.

For what it's worth, the stated reason for the price hike is perfectly understandable: according to Apple, in just the past two months, "memory costs have tripled and flat-panel costs have increased twenty-five percent," and the sitch is likely to get worse before it gets better. Therefore, instead of either cheaping down the iMac by reducing its feature set or trimming its margins to Wall Street-unfriendly levels, the company has opted to squeeze an extra hundred clams out of each sale. Alert fans may recognize the subtle twist on the strategy enacted during the "Great G4 Speed Dump of '99"; whereas back then Apple ratcheted back performance while keeping prices the same (a move which prompted more than its share of cries for the CEO's head on a platter), this time Apple evidently figured that upping the price while keeping the specs the same would lead to fewer riots in the streets. And hey, at least this time around, Apple is honoring all existing orders right off the bat, instead of repeating that whole "cancel and reinstate" fiasco from last time.

Hey, we just noticed that during this keynote, Apple didn't drop a single price. Think about it: the new 10 GB iPod costs an extra hundred bucks, while the original 5 GB model remains rock-steady at $399; the new 23-inch Cinema HD Display costs a grand more than the long-standing 22-inch model, whose price sticks at $2499; and the iMac's sticker price got bumped up a Benjamin just to keep things interesting. In other words, nobody who hoped to save a few bucks by delaying their purchases until after the Stevenote actually benefited from that plan, and a sizeable portion of them actually wound up losing a hundred smackers in the process. Ouch. Think Steve's trying to send us a message? We get the distinct feeling that the moral to this story is supposed to be "BUY NOW OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES." Heck, what's a little wanton spending between friends?