Okay, just a quick question to lead this off, folks: how the heck is it that we still find ourselves surprised by stuff like this? We already knew days ago that Dell was planning to announce its own digital music player today, and we've known forever that Mike Dell copies Steve Jobs's every move roughly two years after the fact. So, yes, we even expected that the Dell Digital Jukebox (still the catchiest product name we've encountered since "Tork King Nut Splitter," by the way) would almost certainly be a shameless ripoff of the iPod.

And yet we still got blindsided by just how shameless Dell can be.

For instance, consider the picture of the Digital Jukebox in the USA Today article about Dell's latest "innovations," as pointed out by faithful viewer Jan Adriaenssens. At least its face isn't all-white, we suppose, and Dell changed the axis of rotation of the scroll wheel. (Good luck scrolling through 5,000 songs with that thing. Imagine the class action suit when people's thumbs start to fall off.) Oh, and the buttons are different shapes and sizes from their iPodian equivalents, and placed in different locations. Meanwhile, the screen is about as iPodesque as possible, but at least they moved the battery indicator from the upper right to the upper left. Overall, you can't look at this thing and not think "iPod." Or, more accurately, "iPod after a twenty-minute beatdown with the Ugly Stick."

And yet, even that isn't really what has us utterly flabbergasted by the seemingly bottomless depths of Dell's gaping lack of originality. If you want incontestable proof that Dell is the be-all and end-all of copycatdom, the proverbial Mariana Trench into which all creativity sinks never to be seen again, look no further than the announcement of the Dell Music Store, the company's "new music download service that offers thousands of music selections and allows seamless, legal downloading of songs to the Dell DJ." Gosh... that sounds somehow hauntingly familiar.

Details at this point are still mercifully vague, which is probably the only thing keeping our heads from catching fire from the inside, but Dell claims that the Digital Jukebox and the Dell Music Store will be "available for purchase in time for the holidays." No foolin'? We'll actually be able to buy Dell's entire online music service before the advent of the Annual Nondenominational Winter Gift-Giving Season™? Finally, something to get Scott Blum-- if the Dell Music Store turns out to be as lame as we suspect it might, ol' Scott can have a matching pair of crappy online digital music stores! He's really tough to shop for, and we were worried we were going to have to get him yet another gift certificate to Williams-Sonoma...