It shouldn't come as a shock to any of you to hear that Mike Dell has run out of ideas; after all, product-wise, the guy's just been copying Apple's own R&D for the past seven years, so his innovation mojo pretty much started and ended with that whole "buy really cheap components, staple 'em together, sell 'em with really thin margins to undercut the competition, make it up on volume while driving everyone else out of business" thing. And anyone who's ever been to Walmart knows that Dell's business strategy isn't all that original anyway.

But the extent to which the well has run dry may surprise you a little. You know, of course, that Mike Dell has long been obsessed with Steve Jobs to the point of copying just about everything Apple's ever done first-- and he's sick enough even to have copied the missteps. In particular, you may recall when Dell even mirrored Apple's embarrassing PowerBook 5300 battery recall in the mid-'90s by shipping and then recalling its own flammable laptop batteries in October of 2000. Talk about a lack of imagination. Heck, he was so tapped out when it came to things to do, he even did the battery recall thing again the following May.

So what's the latest in the "Dell copies Apple even when it's bad stuff" saga? Like we said, Mikey's totally out of ideas, so it's another laptop-related recall, but at least this time it's not the batteries again. No, this time around Dell has used as inspiration Apple's July 2001 power adapter recall, in which the black bricks from certain Wall Street and Lombard PowerBook units were pulled out of the field because they were apt to overheat. We're not sure exactly how many PowerBook adapters were affected, but we're pretty sure Dell's going above and beyond: according to a WIRED blurb pointed out by faithful viewer Eric Rice, Mikey-boy's yoinking just shy of a million of the suckers back from his customers, citing the exact same "risk of overheating" that Apple reported a few years back.

Dell has also surpassed Apple on the number of "reports of incidents involving the AC adapters overheating" (seven, compared to Apple's six), but in both cases "no injuries were reported." And hey, isn't this interesting? Apple's potentially faulty adapters were sold "from May 1998 until March 2000," while Dell's were sold "between September 1998 and February 2002." Sounds to us almost as if Dell started buying power adapters from Apple's manufacturer at the height of Mike's Steve-mania, but couldn't switch to the funky round alien-yo-yo ones that Apple debuted with the original iBook at the end of 1999 and started shipping with the Pismo PowerBook in the spring of 2000.

Okay, so maybe "interesting" wasn't the right word. But, you know, we feel a pretty strong obligation to keep you posted whenever Dell's Apple-obsession flares up like this, because when Mike finally winds up sitting in a clock tower while wearing a black turtleneck and picking off fleeing citizens with a high-powered rifle, we want to make sure you were informed enough to have steered well clear of the guy. We bore because we care. Now give us a hug.