And thusly is hope restored! Remember yesterday when we mentioned the extreme unlikelihood that rumors of a Friday "Tiger's Done!" announcement would come true? Well, it still isn't anything we'd exactly bet the farm on, and the prospect of a full-blown Stevenotesque media event is pretty much out of the question (unless Apple knows how to teleport reporters-- which we're not ruling out), but if you really had your heart set on some form of official acknowledgment from Apple that Tiger will ship sometime in April, something like, say, a Friday press release no longer appears to be completely incompatible with this plane of reality. Why? Because Tiger has apparently gone gold.

Yep, if you blinked, you missed it; the last we'd heard, Apple had just shipped build 8A425 to developers and designated it the first "final candidate," but now, seemingly mere moments later, AppleInsider reports that a newer build-- 8A428-- has officially been declared Tiger's gold master. Assuming that's true, there's no doubt it's already been whisked away (or possibly teleported) to the duplicators who are even now stamping out gazillions of retail Tiger disks in preparation for an imminent frenzy of mass consumption. Normal turnaround time for Apple turning a gold master into actual snazzily-boxed retail product sitting on store shelves is usually just a couple of weeks, so a mid-April ship date still sounds eminently doable.

Now, if you're not preordering from Amazon to lock in that $35 rebate, obviously you should buy your copy of Tiger at the nearest Apple retail store; after all, if you're going to pay the full retail price for this thing, you might as well get some entertainment for your hard-earned cash. And as you probably recall, when Panther first hit the scene, Apple stores held whopping great shindigs to celebrate the latest Mac OS X upgrade, at which they cranked up the tunes, handed out dog tags (for some reason), and... well, that's actually about all we can remember, although we've got the faintest mental image of an Apple retail employee towering above us with some sort of funnel rig and a great, big, mostly-empty bottle of something or other as the room spun gently around us. So keep your eyes peeled and your stomach pump handy, because if Apple is making similar plans for a Tiger intro party, you certainly don't want to miss a throwdown of that magnitude.

However you actually get your hot little hands on a copy, though, the real fun obviously comes when you finally install Tiger itself and can then flip all your Dashboard widgets over and back and over again 'til the cows come home (and floss, brush, go to sleep, dream cow-y little dreams, wake up, and go back out again for another day of serious cud-chewing). So this is it, early adopters: get plenty of rest, because Tiger is only three weeks away, tops. Will you be ready?

Speaking of flip-flops, have you heard the latest about that blatant lawsuit-waiting-to-happen iPod shuffle carbon copy, LUXPRO's "Super shuffle"? It's hard to get a fix on this company: two weeks ago, LUXPRO looked like an unusually unimaginative Asian manufacturing company with a poor grasp of trade dress law and an irrational non-fear of lawyers; one week ago, it looked more like a scheming pack of Evil Masterminds™ who never intended to ship the Super shuffle as an actual product and only created a prototype for the massive publicity they knew it'd bring them. But now we're starting to lean back the other way again-- because the Super shuffle hasn't so much vanished from the LUXPRO site (the way a publicity-grabbing vaporware product would) as it has morphed ever-so-slightly into something far more craven and cowardly.

Check it out: Engadget notes that if you load up the original URL, what used to be the Super shuffle page over at the LUXPRO site is now pimping the "Super Tangent" instead. The specs are, unsurprisingly, completely identical to those of the erstwhile Super shuffle, but the Tangent boasts a radically different industrial design-- and by "radically different," we mean it's still the exact same carbon-copy ripoff of an iPod shuffle, except that now it comes in black and red as well as white and the buttons have had little divots chunked out of them in a transparent effort to stave off a lawsuit. Oh, and the words "SUPER SHUFFLE" on the back have been replaced with "Super Tangent." (At one point, apparently the product was called the "Super Shiner," instead, because that's what showed up printed on its back.)

Now, when we say that LUXPRO has made these design changes, we should probably clarify that slightly, because all the "photos" of the Super Tangent are obvious Photoshop mock-ups (and godawful poor ones at that, we might add). And that implies one of two scenarios. The first is that LUXPRO really did plan to copy the iPod shuffle's design-- and even its name-- wholesale, and was either too stupid or too brazen to realize that it'd get chewed into a stringy pulp by a grinning pack of Apple lawyers, so when the legal ramifications were finally made clear, it decided to alter its purloined design just enough to stay out of hot water. As we noted before, the only person claiming to have firsthand knowledge that "it was just a brilliant publicity stunt" was Jack Campbell, who has, historically speaking, not exactly been a Burbling Fountain of Truth.

The other possibility is that Jack was right, the Super shuffle was indeed intended solely as a publicity stunt, and the company saw so much customer interest in its nonexistent product that now it's trying to produce something as close as possible without stepping on Apple's legal toes. But whatever LUXPRO's original intentions, we've got some advice for LUXPRO's incompetent Photoshop jockey. First, take a class or something, because right now even the Weekly World News would balk at publishing one of your mockups as an "unretouched photo." And second, when it comes to changing the Super shuffle's design, keep going-- don't stop now. We aren't exactly experts on international intellectual property law, but we strongly suspect that there isn't a court in this half of the galaxy that wouldn't find the Super Tangent's current design as pictured to be a trade dress infraction likely to dilute Apple's brand and cause customer confusion.

Actually, you know what? On second thought, don't change a thing. We could use yet another Apple lawsuit around here, especially one so likely to provide a constant stream of comic relief.

Larger, more established manufacturers-- unlike LUXPRO-- are usually smart enough (or have enough lawyers on retainer) to know that cloning another company's entire product design is a big no-no. Look at Dell. Well, maybe not right at it, since that'd probably be sort of nauseating. But look just a little to the left of Dell, and you'll see the sort of copycatting that doesn't attract a raft of lawsuits; instead of making an iPod knock-off that looked exactly like Apple's player, it created the Dell Digital Jukebox-- a device that was roughly the same shape, size, and color as an iPod (and therefore hinted at it enough to call forth the association in the minds of customers), but was so irretrievably ugly and cheap-looking that no one could ever possibly mistake it for an Apple-branded product. See how that works?

So we can't say we're surprised that Hewlett-Packard has "borrowed" one aspect of Apple's industrial design in the latest revision to some of its consumer offerings. According to CNET, the latest Pavilion PCs boast a "silver-and-white design" strongly reminiscent of Apple's pervasive product color schemes. HP admits the similarity, but insists it's just a coincidence: "We got a very warm reception for this. We didn't do it because Apple did it. We did it because our customers told us that they liked it." Well, yeah-- except that customers probably like it because it reminds them of their various iPods.

And it would be futile for HP to deny that it was trying, in part, to match the very co-branded iPods that it sells to its customers, right? After all, The Inquirer reports that HP's new Media Center m7000 systems will be the first computers "with a built-in docking spot for an iPod," a situation the site plays up as some sort of anathema to Mac users-- "the religious equivalent of a Roman Catholic Church service taking place in a Taliban mosque." Well, maybe that would be true... if the dock were indeed fully integrated and built into the top of the new HPs. But HP's "built-in dock" is just the standard Apple standalone dock with a "molded piece of plastic" that fits around it as it "sits on top of the PC." For some reason we aren't exactly apoplectic with seething envy over here.

Anyway, even if you charitably believe that HP's new white-and-silver look isn't directly cribbed from Apple's tried-and-true design palette, it's nice to hear that HP's own market research shows that Apple chose a color scheme for its products that tests well among consumers today. Then again, we can't imagine there isn't at least a little causality at play, here; after all, Apple's been doing the white-and-silver thing for, what, well over three years now, right? So maybe that's why so many consumers told HP that they liked it. In any case, we can at least give HP props for not going the LUXPRO route and introducing an "iPavilion G5" or something. At least, not yet.