Great news for Macintosh lovers arrives with word that Apple Computer Inc. slashed prices on the ultra-elegant G4 Cube by $300, to a mere $1,450, which means that maybe somebody might be able to actually afford the $999 companion monitor, a streamlined sliver of flat-panel elegance that makes the slow-selling Cube just about the most beautiful computer ever designed.
Apple once again is all but fighting for its life with a low stock price, overflowing inventory and slow sales forecast for at least the next couple of quarters. The price cuts were announced as Apple prepares for the annual pilgrimage known as Macworld Expo, this week in San Francisco.
ONE-CLICK TAXATION
UNCLE SPAM
One Internet scheme that always makes money, come Internet winter or sizzling silicon summer alike, is www.irs.gov, your Uncle Sam’s Internal Revenue Service. The tax collector’s Web site is all abuzz with news that 2001 will mark the first time you can completely pay your income taxes over the Internet without sending so much as a single sheet of paper to your government.
Computer users who want to mouse their money to Washington will select five-digit personal identification numbers instead of mailing in signature forms. With all those unwanted write-offs coming to us courtesy of the Nasdaq meltdown, the agency expects 42 million returns to be filed this way.
YAHOOS NIX NAZIS
WELL, DUH?
Starting Thursday, the auctions at Yahoo.com no longer will allow hatemongers or just garden variety creeps to use the Web site to sell Nazi and Ku Klux Klan memorabilia. The Internet pioneers who founded Yahoo! had reacted negatively at first to demands from France to stop trading this dreck, which is outlawed in that country.
But as horrified customers all around the world vented their outrage, the heretofore hugely popular Web site caved in and ordered the ban worldwide, effective Thursday. Nazi and Klan items will join other untouchables the site already prohibits, including tobacco and used underwear.
INTERNET WINTER
Y2KILLED.COM
At least 210 major Internet companies closed their doors entirely during 2000, putting 15,000 people out of work and deep-sixing $1.5 billion of investors’ funds. Glum as that is, it is only the count of those that were outright shut down. Far more people were laid off and far more money was lost by companies that didn’t throw themselves on their corporate swords but simply laid off the bulk of their workforce and struggled on despite tanked stock prices and fleeing customers.
Details, if you can bear to hear any more, are at www.webmergers .com.
