Say, buddy, can you spare a couple of bucks? We could use an extra gigabyte of storage right about now. See, the rumor mill may have left us with no surprises as far as the new iBooks and Power Mac are concerned, but Apple did manage to squeeze one newly refreshed product in under anyone's radar: according to a company press release, Apple's Xserve RAID storage system now packs up to 5.6 terabytes of storage into its same semi-svelte three rack units of space-- and all for a price that, according to Apple, represents "the industry's most aggressive price for storage of just over $2 per GB." (It's actually $2.32 per gig, not including sales tax, but who's counting?)

Now, it's no secret that Apple is looking to make inroads into enterprise sales, and the Xserve product line is its best hope of getting its foot in the door, so we're a little surprised that Apple's press release didn't express the Xserve RAID's new storage capacity in terms more familiar to the beige IT set. Just in case any of those guys accidentally happened to tune in, here's the skinny: 5.6 terabytes is just shy of four million floppies. You're welcome.

Ha! We kid! Even the beigest IT dinosaurs aren't using floppies for anything these days but sneakernet driver installations and evening out the short leg on the coffee table, and they certainly aren't building big honkin' RAID arrays out of them. (Incidentally, Windows wouldn't let them even if they wanted to-- but Mac OS X would.) And while most IT management types we've met have an anti-Apple streak even wider than our own anti-Microsoft one (and believe us when we tell you that's saying something), their psychological need to minimize upfront expenditures is so deeply ingrained that they might be able to look right past the Xserve RAID's Apple logo and its non-ugly-as-sin design to focus in on what really is a darn attractive price for no-hassle Fibre Channel network storage. Plus it's more buzzword-compliant than ever, complete with Cisco and SUSE Linux certification-- and shipping is free.

So what does all this mean to you if you're not an IT professional, but rather just a typical Mac user without any particular interest in enterprise storage solutions? Well, aside from comparing the price of a gigabyte of Xserve RAID storage to the price you paid for your first 1 GB hard drive in 1996 and wanting to fling yourself out the nearest window, in an immediate sense, not a whole lot-- unless you've got $12,999 burning a hole in your pocket and you're enough of a geek to want to spend it on a top-of-the-line Xserve RAID to fill up with illegally downloaded Hollywood movies and Internet porn instead of, say, a Nissan Sentra. But in a larger sense, if the Xserve RAID really does let Apple wriggle its way into enterprise sales and the company eventually starts selling fleets of 10,000 iMacs to Fortune 500 companies who See the Light™, that means a healthy boost in market share, some serious street cred with the Wall Street suits, and an increasingly ticked-off Michael Dell. Frankly, we don't see a down side.