We hate to say "we told you so," but... oh, wait, no-- we hate to say "here's that money we owe you." We love to say "we told you so"! So, yeah, we told you so. Or rather, we almost told you so. There's no question that we were critical of Henrico County's Certifiably Stoopid™ plan to ditch its tens of thousands of Apple iBooks and replace them with Dells in the name of "cost savings," but now that we look, we see that we weren't exactly explicit about the hole in its rationale for the switch.

To wit: never mind that switching to Wintel laptops is bound to increase tech support costs and downtime due to viruses and worms (like the one currently smacking around Windows 2000 systems all over the globe), but if cost is such an issue, why, exactly, was the county planning to sell off its excess iBooks at a price of just $50 each? Seems to us that if money were really the overriding factor, as opposed to the knee-jerk (and we do mean jerk) anti-Mac bigotry of the clueless honchos holding the big rubber stamp, surely they'd be trying to recoup some capital by selling said iBooks at closer to their actual value. After all, the AirPort card in each unit alone fetches more than fifty clams on eBay.

Also, while we were pretty clear about thinking the switch and consequent iBook fire sale were unquestionably bad ideas, our analysis conspicuously lacked any prediction of the obvious results of offering a limited number of laptop computers to the public for roughly one-tenth of their street price-- e.g. riots, mayhem, public urination, motor vehicles plowing through crowds of people, baby carriages and mothers of young children trampled underfoot, and worst of all, mass backsies. Faithful viewer Royce was the first of dozens to point out the utter chaos that erupted due to Henrico's ill-advised plan to sell easily-eBayable and -hockable electronic gear at rock-bottom prices on a first-come, first-served basis. CNN has more details on mankind at its nadir, while the Richmond Times-Dispatch has photos of the insanity and NBC12 has-- you know you want it-- video!

Much as we'd like to think that the citizenry of Henrico County regressed to violence and poor personal hygiene because of their deep-rooted love of Apple's products (i.e. "Those four-year-old iBooks are so fly, I'm willing to publicly wet myself and then swing a folding chair at a grandmother of five just for the privilege of buying one"), the truth of the matter is that most of the frenzied customers were probably just looking for a quick way to turn $50 into $300 or more without having to spend all that time tediously scratching the silver stuff off of instant lottery tickets. Still, it's free publicity for Apple, and while we feel really sorry for the seventeen people who were injured and that one lady who lost a flip-flop, we're going to try to look at the bright side. Given Henrico County's defection to Dells and Cobb County canceling its iBook program amid claims of deception and back-room shenanigans, we figure we're entitled.

Not that it's all bad news on the Apple-in-education front; Macworld UK reports that, in the UK, at least, Apple's share in schools is experiencing "major growth" and now represents 11 percent of the market. And in a few years' time, when some UK school district unloads a slew of used iBooks for £30 apiece, you can bet that the Brits will be far more polite while stomping each other and soiling themselves for cheap laptoppage.