Check it out-- it's a gold mine! The Mac Man has an exclusive peek into many of Apple's future plans, straight from the mouth of Fred Johnson, a soon-to-be ex-Apple employee with a better job offer trying to get fired for leaking news so that he can reap severance benefits before moving on to his new position. It's all there, folks-- details about Apple's new marketing campaign ("Do the Evolution"), specs of upcoming iMacs (300 MHz G3, 64 MB of RAM, a 16" screen, DVD-ROM, ATI RAGE 128 graphics, and on-board FireWire all for $1299), the skinny on the P1 (and its wireless clip-on modem option), hints about the cobranded MacMate handheld (OEM'ed from Palm), and great news about future professional-level offerings. What a windfall! Praise be to Fred Johnson for breaking the silence!

Except, of course, that it was posted just a few days before April, which should set off a few alarm bells. If you didn't go off half-cocked and took the time to read the "explanation article" linked to at the bottom of the page, you read that the whole thing was an early April Fool's joke. There is no Fred Johnson at Apple, and if that name rings a bell, it's because "Fred Johnson" was the name used in the fake email sent to Apple Recon a while back "confirming" hand-cranked P1's. The same guy wrote both hoaxes. And he also got Mac OS Rumors to post details on Mac OS X. What a busy little beaver he is. He claims he's not out to "mislead people," but he writes hoaxes that he wishes were true in the hope that it will somehow push Apple to make his dreams a reality.

The moral of the story, of course, is that keeping a watchful eye out for pranks and hoaxes on April 1st alone is never sufficient. We at AtAT recommend that a reasonable period to keep an eye peeled for April Fool's jokes begins around, say, late January and runs until about the middle of August. Chalk it all up to commercialism-- between the greeting card industry raking in millions on April Fool's cards and stores trying to maximize their revenue due to the rampant buying of April Fool's gifts, we're just seeing another sacred celebration inherit "holiday creep," that dread syndrome which is responsible for mall Christmas decorations going up in October. Sigh... Whatever happened to the true meaning of April Fool's Day? Do we need Linus to explain it all to us again after the April Fool's play?

Prepare for a purple flood of biblical proportions. Earlier on Tuesday NoBeige had posted that "Apple reportedly just received a large shipment" of iMacs from the manufacturing plants. How large? Try 50,000 large. That would be terrific news, given how constrained the iMac supply is right now. It gets better (sort of): these 50,000 iMacs are supposedly all Grape. Every single one. Given that Grape is one of the most popular flavors (probably second only to Blueberry), that's a positive thing. Never mind the fact that a single cluster of 50,000 Grape iMacs sounds like something Salvador Dali would have painted when he was in a particularly weird mood.

Not that we haven't seen some pretty surrealistic and absurd stuff popping up in the Mac world before, but something about the image of 50,000 Grape iMacs hints to us that it's just another early April Fool's joke. If the story isn't true, that's a darn shame, because the channel could really use 50,000 iMacs right about now-- even if they're all Grape.

Of course, even if the story is only a joke, we're going to have a hard time clearing the image of 50,000 Grape iMacs out of our brains. We can just see them set up side by side on an impossibly long glowing white table, stretching majestically out into the distance, vanishing at the horizon line. Or perhaps arranged in Apple's "Wall of iMacs" formation, such as Steve Jobs used at his last couple of Macworld Expo keynote addresses-- over a thousand of those walls, resplendent in their translucent purpleness. Or best yet, all 50,000 Grape iMacs assembled on the lawn outside Apple's headquarters, each angled and tilted towards a giant statue of Steve Jobs, as if they're all worshipping at his feet. Somebody call Pixar-- I think we've got an idea for a short subject...

It's the end of an era: the Berkeley Mac Users Group (BMUG), one of the largest Mac users groups in existence, just closed their office. In a letter to members, they cite the reason to be falling membership renewals and their resulting inability to afford the office space. They've also decided to stop printing and sending their massive biannual newsletter, which, if you've never seen one, was truly a wonder to behold: they were roughly the size and thickness of a local telephone directory. BMUG will now be focusing most of its available resources on fostering its online community, Planet BMUG, which is a First Class-based bulletin board and the most vital and active component of the group.

This brings up an interesting point: is the Internet killing users groups? After all, people who join users groups often do so to gain access to a pool of information so that they can learn more about their computers and have a resource to turn to when things go wrong. Now that the Internet has made that kind of information so easy to find, we can certainly understand why users groups simply can't afford real-world office space and honest-to-goodness printed newsletters anymore.

Or, possibly, it's just us. We used to be members of the Boston Computer Society, which, at the time, claimed to include the largest Mac users group in the country. A few years ago, the BCS shut down after something like twenty years in existence, leaving us without a users group. So we joined BMUG, who graciously stepped up to the plate and offered to take on orphaned BCS members by transferring memberships. Now, while BMUG is still going, it's upsetting to see them struggling financially-- especially after rumors over a year ago that they were close to tanking. Sense a pattern? So we're staying well away from all users groups these days, so that we don't infect them with our karma. It's just our particular albatross to wear.