Look out, Regular Shmoes; Macs aren't just for "the rest of us" anymore. Sure, a cozy lil' eMac might still be the most user-friendly choice for getting Grandma online to download snapshots of her grandkids, but in recent years Macs are becoming increasingly acceptable among the hardcore nerd crowd who would once have no sooner used a Mac than a VCR Co-Pilot. Chalk part of it up to the inherent Geek Mystique of Mac OS X's underlying UNIX layer, which made iBooks and PowerBooks fashionable at nerd gatherings. The rest of it comes down to Apple's hardware design; sleek portables and a Power Mac G5 that, with a 1 GHz bus, a pair of 64-bit processors, and Spartan aluminum looks to die for, practically qualified as a tech geek's centerfold pin-up. Oh, and let's not forget the instant street cred Apple gained in scientific circles when the world's third-fastest supercomputer turned out to be comprised entirely of desktop Power Macs lashed together for a cost barely more than pocket change.

So the Mac demographic's been veering hard to the tech-savvy side of the bell curve for the past few years, and we're wondering if that's got anything to do with what appears to be a major change in attitude down at One Infinite Loop regarding Apple's consumer-grade hardware. Faithful viewer GotMac noted the appearance of a new support article at Apple's site which lists the user-installable and -replaceable parts in the soon-to-ship iMac G5, and it's a lot longer than we're used to seeing. With the previous iMac ("Ol' Lampy"), the only two user-installable parts were RAM and an AirPort card; ditto the iBook, except you're also allowed to replace the keyboard and battery. Need to swap out a dead hard disk or power supply? Call an authorized service center.

But like we said, that appears to be changing; Apple claims that "the iMac G5 is designed to make it easy for you to install replacement parts if you need to"-- not only the AirPort Extreme card and RAM, but also the internal hard drive, the power supply, the optical drive, the modem, the entire LCD display, and the mid-plane assembly (which includes "the main logic board, the G5 processor, fans, and so forth"). In other words, pretty much the whole darn system is user-replaceable part by part, except for, apparently, the speakers. So don't blow 'em out.

So does this mark a dramatic shift in Apple's attitude toward its customers' confidence and ability to perform more than the very simplest hardware modifications? Could be-- and we're sure that the iMac G5 becomes at least a little more attractive to the tech-savvy folks out there who know that they can pop in a bigger, faster hard drive without having to schlep the system to a service provider or voiding their warranties. Frankly, we like this. While we understood the old "protect the users from themselves" directive, we still found it a teensy bit insulting; now it's like Apple respects our intelligence or something.

Oop-- wait-- scratch that. We just found another support article explaining "how to pick up and carry your iMac G5," which is to: 1) "make sure all cables and cords are disconnected"; 2) "Pick up the iMac G5 by grasping both sides of the computer"; and 3) "carry it to wherever you wish." In other words, once you make sure it's not tied down to anything, the way to pick it up and carry it is to, well, pick it up and carry it. Gee, where's the part about first making sure you have opposable thumbs?

Well, we suppose it could be worse; they could have an article about how to tell whether you've got an HP iPod or an Apple one.

...They do?

It says to look for an HP logo on the back, doesn't it?

Heaven help us all.