Gee, and for a brief shining moment we thought Christmas had come early this year: faithful viewer Mav breathlessly informed us that a new promo graphic had popped up in the rotation on the Apple Store home page, touting the latest Power Mac G5 lineup with pricing that was too good to be true: the entry-level 1.6 GHz model, which had just dropped from $1999 to $1799 a week ago, had dropped again to $1599; the new dual-1.8 GHz config, which debuted a week ago at $2499, had already slid to $2299; and the Big Kahuna, the dual-2.0 GHz unit, had dipped from $2999 all the way down to $2699. Break out the nog; stocking stuffers for everyone!

Of course, the only problem here is that anything that's "too good to be true" is, by definition, kindasorta false. If you actually click on the promo, you're taken to the Power Mac G5 selection page, where last week's new pricing is, unsurprisingly, still in effect. (No, Virginia, there aren't two price drops in the span of a week.) And yet there was that big ol' promo graphic, sitting plain as day on the Apple Store home page-- Apple has since fixed the pricing anomaly, and you can see the corrected version here, but until early this afternoon that graphic showed much lower pricing. So what's the what? Could this be another example of Apple's Web Gnomes accidentally leaking a big secret a few days too early?

It's possible, we suppose; while two price drops in a week would be pretty unheard of, since the holiday shopping season officially kicks into hyperdrive this Friday, we guess that a Power Mac price drop then isn't totally out of the question. For a while we were utterly convinced that the incorrect pricing was just a simple and meaningless file-linking error; MacMinute pointed out that the reduced prices in the graphic "match Apple's educational pricing," and MacRumors noted that the image is "essentially the same as the educational store image." The key word there, though, is "essentially"-- they're not the same image, since the text colors are swapped in the price listing, and the education image's name ("cp_promo_top_dual1_8_g5_edu.jpg") clearly indicates that it's for education sales only.

If the two graphics were actually the exact same image or the same file on the server, we'd agree in a heartbeat that there's no basis for speculating about anything more than how the Web Gnome who screwed up this time will be "corrected" (our money's on "doused in HP Fruity and fed to a peckish Komodo dragon"), but the fact is that the two images were different pictures in different files with different (and descriptive) names. So maybe there's something more to all this than just a meaningless mistake.

For instance, could the Mystery Graphic™ have been created before last week's announcement on the 18th, revealing the line-up's original planned pricing before a last-minute boost? Maybe; its filename-- "cp_promo_top_g5_112103.jpg"-- implies that it was either created on the 21st (after the final pricing had been made public), or intended to be shown on the 21st. That was a Friday, which isn't a traditional "New Apple Stuff" day, but it's not impossible. Of course, if it was created on the 21st, then hey, maybe there is a holiday price drop right around the corner.

Yeah, and maybe Ballmers will fly out of our [insert plural form of a bodily orifice that won't jeopardize our PG rating here]. Sadly, the simplest and likeliest scenario is that a Graphic Gnome simply mistook the educational pricing for standard pricing when he or she was tasked with creating the image. Darn that Occam's razor! Think of all the neat stuff that could happen if the guy would just grow a frickin' beard already.

As for the way that Apple's various gnomes seem to keep making little (and not-so-little) mistakes all the time, we think it might be time to bail on them altogether and start hiring full-fledged elves, instead. Sure, they cost a little more, but you get what you pay for. Santa seems to do okay.