Whoa, we must have dozed off during the movie or something; isn't Apple supposed to be the "little guy"? We could've sworn that just days ago we mentioned that Apple's market share last quarter was still pretty stagnant at a measly 2.3%, while Dell managed to boost its share from 15% to 18% in just the past year. That would mean that Dell is Big John Lotsacustomers and Apple is Skinny Leon Notathreat, right? So why is Dell bending over backwards to swipe Apple's customers at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research?

Check it out: faithful viewer Michael McKinney informed us that MacNN has some details on hardball customer-poaching strategies that Dell has put into play over at Chez Whitehead. Apparently Whiteheadites can get trade-in allowances of "nearly $250" for old blue and white G3s and "over $400" for Power Mac G4s if they give up said Macs to buy a Dell Precision workstation instead-- with another $250 rebate on top of that to make the platform defection a little easier to swallow. Granted, the total savings probably aren't quite equal to the resale value of the Macs themselves, but it's still a pretty darn aggressive offer, considering that the market share numbers alone should put Apple well beneath Dell's notice. How can we possibly explain this anomalous behavior?

We'll tell you how: fear. Pure, unadulterated, I-just-saw-Steve-Ballmer-naked fear. Michael Dell is probably hugging his widdle Teddy bear and weeping in cold-sweat terror now that the Power Mac G5 is only a month away from shipping; indeed, the G5 is practically built for use in heavy-duty biomed research facilities like the Whitehead Institute, so maybe Mikey's hoping to sucker as many Mac users over to the Dark Side as he can before they get a taste of the G5 and just laugh at anything Dell might ever have to offer. Because, you know, those biomedical engineers? Obviously not too bright. So in Mike's eyes, this ought to be a cakewalk.

Of course, another possibility is that Mike is just looking for a way to get lots of reasonably-current Macs on the cheap. You'll notice that the Mac models specified for the trade-in program will all run Panther when it ships; sounds to us like Mikey's getting ready to replace all his company's Wintels with Macs. Ridiculous, you say? Hey, it's no goofier than when Motorola replaced all its Macs with PCs running the competition's processor...