Oh, goody, we love class action settlement terms! What's not to like? A whole slew of people who never asked to be included in the first place get their choice of either a coupon for a free appetizer when purchased with a full-price entree at Bennigan's or a check for $15 if they send in that washing machine that broke down three years ago due to what turned out to be a systemic manufacturing defect. So the company that screwed up is out a wad of cash (or a wad of valuable money-saving coupons), the customers get their conciliatory potato skins, and the lawyers get hundreds of thousands of dollars for championing the cause of downtrodden washing machine buyers everywhere. Justice is served and it's all bacony!

Okay, so we don't really love 'em all that much-- which is why we've kinda been avoiding telling you about the preliminary approval of one of Apple's latest class actions, namely, that one about how Mac OS X didn't support a handful of features on various "supported" Macs when it first shipped. The fact of the matter is, though, Apple flat-out admitted that it had no intention of supporting some of those technologies in Mac OS X (like the woefully slow ATI RAGE II+ video chip in the original Bondi Blue iMacs, for obvious reasons), so they couldn't have had much of a defense. The settlement, therefore, comes as no surprise, and if you're one of the lucky qualifying class members, just wait'll you hear what you're entitled to get:

• You can get your money back-- all you need to do is return that copy of Mac OS X you bought two years ago. Oh, and you have to "declare under penalty of perjury as follows: 'I have not regularly used Mac OS X on my Covered Product,'" etc. etc. etc. Because there are a ton of people out there who paid $129 for Mac OS X, discovered that it didn't play DVDs well, and therefore wiped it from their hard drives and kept the CD-ROMs in a drawer just waiting for the day when some class action lawsuit might let them claim a refund. Score!

• Or, if you somehow managed to survive the inability to watch Black Knight with the director's commentary on your Tangerine iBook and therefore did keep using Mac OS X, you can fill out a claim form on which you "declare under penalty of perjury that [your] ability to run certain graphics applications, games and/or to play DVDs was impaired while running Mac OS X on [your] Covered Product" and score a coupon for $25 off any purchase of $99 or more from the Apple Store. Sadly, they don't seem to sell DVDs anymore, and even when they did, they probably didn't carry much in the Martin Lawrence oeuvre. Sorry 'bout that.

So that's that. We don't expect a whole lot of folks to claim the full refund, but there are probably a bunch of customers out there with early iMacs, fruit-flavored iBooks, pre-FireWire PowerBooks, and beige G3s who really did limp along with Mac OS X since 10.0 and are therefore entitled to the $25 discount at the Apple Store, which isn't a bad score, if you think about it. Of course, it's no Bloomin' Onion, but hey, what is?