Well, whaddaya know? Occasionally rumors do come true! Most of you probably saw Apple's latest press release trumpeting the fact that .Mac subscribers now number some 180,000 sucke-- er, satisfied customers, which Apple describes as a "phenomenal success." (Is it just us, or are these running subscriber count press releases sounding a little desperate and emotionally needy?) What you may not have noticed is the far more low-key announcement about .Mac pricing for schools.

Try this: keep Apple's emphatic and less-than-a-week-old assurances to MacCentral that "educational institutions would not receive a discounted rate for .Mac subscription services" firmly in mind, and then cast your baby blues/browns/greens/whatevers over to Apple's newly-launched .Mac for Education page. (Warning to rigidly logical artificially sentient computers from a cheesy science fiction universe: you may encounter a paradox, and AtAT cannot be held responsible for any ensuing sparks, smoking, and eventual self-destruction amid your own failing computery voice repeating "CANNOT COMPUTE! CANNOT COMPUTE!!" that exposure to such logical inconsistency may cause. Them's the breaks, you know?)

Yes indeedy do, Apple has caved and announced special .Mac pricing for schools after all: $59 per year (with a cute half-size Mini-iDisk and 33% less mail storage space), provided that schools toss a minimum of ten accounts in the cart when they order. The upshot of this development is twofold. Firstly, it means that schools who chose Macs over Dells because of the value added by 500 free iTools accounts for their students no longer have to pony up $50,000 a year to upgrade said iTools accounts to .Mac subscriptions; now they only need to cough up a paltry thirty grand annually, which, as we all know, most schools can find under the sofa cushions in the teachers' lounge. On top of that, we don't see anything about a first-year discount for upgrading from iTools to .Mac, which implies that, at least for the first year, schools with existing iTools accounts have to pay more than the $49.95 the rest of us have to spend-- but hey, at least they get less storage space, so we guess that makes it all okay.

The second main consequence of Apple's newly-announced .Mac for Education-- and this is the biggie-- is that no one on the planet is ever going to believe a single word Joe Hayashi says ever again for the rest of his life. But then again, he is a director of Product Marketing, and therefore most sane people probably never really listened to him in the first place. So he's probably pretty used to it by now anyway.

Actually, there's a third probable consequence, now that we think about it: Apple's market share in education might continue to sink like a stone now that Macs can no longer even boast free integrated Internet services as a defense against the assault of Dell's far cheaper per-box prices. But obviously Apple has thought of all that and has a Master Plan™ in motion to recapture the education market where it once reigned supreme-- it's just that we mere mortals are too unenlightened to see the broad, graceful strokes of Apple's infallible cosmic design. Right?