Staring deep into one's reflection in the coolly absurd impracticality of this 24-carat gold MacBook Pro, one must ask the question: are people actually buying these things?

Surely someone must be--after all, the novelty honeymoon of such devices has seemingly worn off. We've already seen gold and diamond-studded MP3 players, cell phones, and yes, notebooks.

Sure creating another will still get you some exposure in the blogosphere (ahem)--as will lighting yourself on fire and shoving pretty much anything in a blender, but how do such things translate into sales? The key here seems to be that, well, you pretty much just need to find one customer with deep pockets and a lack of concern over the fact that the innards of their extreme vanity blingage will be obsolete, a few months down the line, in order to get back into the black.

In the case of this 24-carat encased, diamond-emblazoned MacBook Pro, the company is quick to point out that they're not interested in mass production here. Says Oregon's Computer Choppers, "[we] want to clarify that we're modding a one-off unit here. While everyone is reporting what a diamond Apple logo can go for, we don't want to go irritating Apple by reproducing their logo for everyone."

I think we have to keep in mind that "mass production" is a fairly relative concept here. Sure Apple has managed to capture a 17.6 share of the notebook market, but how much of that can we reasonably expect to translate into interest in golden notebooks?

Besides, I'm sure Steve Jobs already has like eight of these at home.