We asked for it, and even though I'm kind of regretting it, we got it. On the left is young readers Ben and Austin, dressed for the part (I can't believe no one threw red paint on them) at the Leopard launch this afternoon in Holyoke, MA. And on the right, in the, errr, eMac, is reader Geir Arne from Norway. Boy, do they loves them some hilarious Mac costumes in Norway, because as of this posting, he's on the front page of one of their biggest tech news sites.

Oh man, I can't stop laughing, not just at how crazy these guys look, but just at how extremely happy they are to be dressed up like that and buying Leopard. You guys crack me up. All of these guys (and you, if you send us a picture) will be sure to appear in our Halloween costume gallery on Wednesday, so keep sending those pics in! Sure, you could spend hours on a great costume and show it off to one Apple store in the country, but why not take a pic, send it here, and be seen by all the world?

A little more than a week since Apple began offering a rock-bottom priced iMac configuration targeted at educational customers, the company has stopped offering the machine to anyone other than institutional buyers. The $900 replacement for the eMac differed from the baseline consumer model only in its loss of superdrive, dedicated graphics, bluetooth, and Front Row caused a big stir with students heading back to school this fall.

Rumor in the ether is that this is par-for-the-course for an education product release. The cycle goes like this: Product is announced >> lots of people get excited and order it >> Apple realizes that if they keep getting orders at the current pace, they won't be able to supply the institutional buyers who they originally targeted >> Apple pulls product from mainstream consumer stores >> ...time passes... >> the educational buying season ends >> Apple allows us regular people to place orders again.

[Via MacNN]

This is cool. At my repair job, when someone brings in a broken eMac which turns out to have a bad analog board, we don't think twice about telling then that all is lost. Replacing an analog board on all but the newest machines would cost more than the machine is worth. This guy, however, decided not to give up so easily. He picked up a cheap LCD display at Sam's Club and went to work turning his old broken CRT eMac into a functioning LCD eMac. Some elbow grease and a scavenged power supply later, and our intrepid hacker has the lightest, least power hungry, and coolest running eMac in existence.

Despite the fact that this process requires fully disassembling your eMac, for someone who feels comfortable working on the insides of machines, this is a great way to salvage what would otherwise be a very heavy shiny white doorstop.

AppleInsider, one of our primary sources for that contraband we like to call "Apple rumors", is claiming to have the word on a new education Mac to replace the now defunct eMac. Apparently the all-new eMac will be based around G5 processors and.... wait. That article's from two years ago! We can only conclude that when AppleInsider brought us news of the G5 eMac that they were joking. Obviously, now they're being serious.

This latest rumor features several key points:

• There was an education based Mac in the past and there isn't one now. AppleInsider connects the dots using complex logic to predict that Apple is making a new education Mac.
  
• Teachers and schools will be buying computers in the summer to be ready for the next semester. When people want to buy things, you should try to sell things.
  
• Apple went Intel, so the new eMac will feature an Intel chip. Not a G5 or any of those crappy PowerPC things - who ever liked them anyway?
  
• The eMac's bulky enclosure was its most expensive part. Apple will therefore choose NOT to lose money on an expensive, pointless and bulky enclosure for the next eMac. A tough choice to make.
  
• Thanks to that aggressive rumor scrounging that AppleInsider does on our behalf, they obtained the extremely specific information that the new eMac *might* be available to the average consumer. But it also might not.

For extra entertainment, place the word "duh" after every bullet point.

While I was pondering whether the introduction of Remote Desktop 3 was worthy of shutting down the Apple Store this morning, C.K. pointed out that Apple also updated their Special Deals section. A lot. I can't remember the last time I've had to scroll this much on a page in the Apple Store. It looks like they have refurbished items from almost every one of their products except the MacBook Pro, but they're highlighting the iPod mini with their Special Deals graphic (pictured) almost as if to say "go on iPod mini. 'Git!"

I'd try linking Apple's Special Deals section, but I know that always gets wonky. Plus, the tips I've found like Ars Technica's don't cover linking a section, so all you get is a link to the Apple Store. You're on your own for the rest of the way.

I like the eMac. We have several at my day job, and they're solid and reliable (and low cost, to boot). Alas, they drifted quietly out of existence. Have we heard the last of the low cost, all-in-one Mac?

The folks at Mac OS Rumors think not. They suggest that a machine with a 19", 16:10 wide screen CRT and a Celeron Intel processor is in the works, ready to take over the vacancy created by the eMac. The next question is, would these be education-only, or would the general public be able to purchase one? Time will tell.

[Via MacDailyNews]

TUAW reader John Gaskell, whose rig we featured last week, noticed that, once again, the eMac has disappeared from both the online Apple Store as well as their edu store. Further, while I haven't seen the eMac product page in a while, I thought it used to live at apple.com/emac, while it actually lives at apple.com/education/emac/, with plenty of "just for education" blurbs all over the page. I can't even find the eMac at the edu store in a search, which leads me to think it's probably only available by phone order now. I wonder if all this positive growth Apple is experiencing has allowed them to shuffle the eMac back into its original education slot in the Mac lineup.

Sitting here surrounded by the guts of my eMac, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to put all these bits of metal and plastic back into the case in a different order, or replace some of them entirely. If it were a second generation machine, priority number one would be overclocking. Since my board isn't jumpered, however, that's out of the question. I'll probably end up leaving this a simple repair job. But if I don't, what should I do with it? Two things jump to mind immediately:

1. See if I can dig up the pinouts on the video display, and turn it into a monitor for a Mini, possibly with external FireWire and USB ports.
2. Full fledged Taco: strip it bare and replace the innards with a flat screen and a Mini. Wouldn't even be too much work: there's room in there to seat a Mini case whole without even opening it.

What would you do with an eMac shell?

If you've been wondering why I haven't had many bylines in the past couple of days (come on, you know you have), it's because my trusty eMac died and I've been struggling with repairs. And I do mean struggling. Replacing the clicking hard drive, which should be a simple enough repair, has turned into an hours' long comedy of errors. I love this computer. I love its shiny, no chrome body. I love its iMac-meets-rocketship-nose-cone good looks. Above all, I love its CRT: flat panels don't really work for me, or my eyes. But I don't think I'll ever own another, even if the line is converted to Intel. Here's why.

On this model, Apple got carried away and forgot they were making a computer and that computers break. The screws, which give it just that right touch of industrial design are almost an inch across, but the hex sockets are narrow and shallow, making them prone to stripping. And stripping them is exactly what the service people did when I had it in for a recalled video board. I had to drill two of them out, not a pleasant prospect on a machine that is essentially a thin shell over a bare CRT.

Once you get inside, things get worse. With the power button around the side instead of in front, just taking the case off means stretching the delicate wires to the power button to their limit and then unplugging them one-handed while you hold the case in the air with your other hand. And getting to the hard drive, easily the most frequent point of failure, requires discharging the CRT and disassembling almost the entire machine to get at a unit that is locked away sideways under the "digital board."

The thing is, it didn't used to be like this. Apple engineers used to put effort into making case designs functional, as well as good looking, whether it was the pluggable performa chassis that anticipated modern blade servers, or hinged power supply mounting brackets of the Quadra and early PowerMac cases that nearly doubled the effective working room, or the fold-out sides on the Bondi G3s. Of course, I can't speak for the original iMac, and I know that space is tight in the "nose cone" shell, but there has to be a better way.