Hey, does everybody remember a few years back, when Apple chucked $100 million at Samsung in hopes of guaranteeing that it would be able to secure a reasonably steady stream of those hard-to-get LCD panels? Even back then, Apple had a tough time getting its hands on enough-- and that was when it only needed them for PowerBooks and iBooks. "We'll need more flat displays than ever going forward," said Steve, and he couldn't have been more correct; these days, aside from a couple of lowly G3 iMacs, the company's entire product line is LCD-based. It's like the next phase in Steve's grand scheme for world domination can't commence until there are a certain number of active LCD panels distributed among the populace or something.

And yet, despite having bribed-- excuse us, invested in-- Samsung in hopes of ensuring a reasonable supply of those crucial population-subjugating LCD panels, we can't help but notice that the flat-panel iMac is only just now starting to appear in reasonable quantities; meanwhile, last week Apple was forced to raise the iMac's sticker price by a hundred bucks in part because of rising LCD costs. All of which leaves us wondering what, exactly, Apple got in return for the hundred mil it sunk into Samsung. (A lovely fruit basket at Christmas, at least, we hope.)

Well, we never really kept on top of the story of just where Apple gets its screens, because frankly, we suspect that the finer plot points of LCD panel supply distribution are probably duller than beige-painted dirt. As it turns out, though, apparently Apple hasn't been getting its iMac screens directly from Samsung at all, but rather from LG Philips-- who we're sure is a fine company and all, but we suspect that it's had a bit of trouble keeping up with Apple's especially demanding demand. Things might be different if LG Philips found itself on the receiving end of a $100 million "investment," but that's pure speculation on our part.

Anyway, evidently Steve has had a wake-up call of sorts and has finally decided that relying on a single vendor to supply all of its iMac screens just isn't prudent-- not if he wants to overthrow the worlds' governments sometime before he turns ninety. So, according to DigiTimes, the company has just signed up a second vendor called HannStar. In May, HannStar will reportedly start shipping iMac-suitable screens to Apple at the rate of 10,000 per month, "which could then rise to 30,000" later on. Thirty grand per month? Our lightning-quick math skills tell us that that's enough iMacs for a thousand iMacs each day-- and that's not counting however many screens that LG Philips is still cranking out. Apparently Steve wasn't kidding about the iMacs hitting "volume production"; sounds like pretty soon he's going to have the amps cranked up to eleven.