Hasta La Gadget!

What’s going on at Apple? Here at Gadget Lab we’re subscribing to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice theory: that Steve Jobs steps away from the Cupertino campus for a few months and the monkeys take over, playing all the pranks they can get away with before the boss gets back to work.

Exhibit A: The name of the new iPhone. The Joy of Tech speculates that it may actually be pronounced “iPhone 3G Ass”. This is plausible, but more likely is that there are some Woz fans still at Apple and they snuck through a homage to the Apple ][GS. There are some other parallels, too. The ][GS had 256KB RAM, the iPhone 3G S has 256MB; the GS stood for Graphics and Sound, the S stands for Speed and Secrecy.

Exhibit B: Prices. Apple has dropped them, drastically. A $99 iPhone? Check. A cheap-ish MacBook Air? Check. $29 OS upgrade? Check, check, check.

When Jobs gets back to the office, we expect there will be trouble. Key executives will be forced to stand in the corner in pointy hats (probably with a Vista logo on them) and with a single wave of his hand, Jobs will restore prices to their original levels, change the name of the new iPhone to something that doesn’t sound like a Sony camera model number and, more importantly, erase from all living memory evidence of the plastic MacBook and the $99 iPhone 3G. Apple doesn’t sell hobbling, legacy products, remember?

The restoration will be complete. And Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, has it not?