It's pretty hard to believe that it was exactly one year ago today that Apple first took the wraps off the iMac and the whole world said, "Whoa." (Actually, the whole world said, "What the hell is that?!", but Apple Marketing decided that phrase was too long for the t-shirts.) There it was, a translucent blue and white space egg, just bursting with enthusiasm as if it just knew that it would be shattering sales records when it would finally reach store shelves three months later. At the time, Jobs quipped that it looked like it came from another world-- one with better designers. Fair enough; the alien designer primarily responsible for the iMac's distinctive form is Jonathan Ive, and we bet that right now he's either happy and excited to see his progeny win yet another design award, or he's just bored with the incessant flow of iMac-related accolades. Regardless, there's now another one to throw on the pile; as MacChat points out, the iMac was this year's only "Gold" winner in the product design category of the British Design & Art Direction awards.

Personally, we expect that Mr. Ive is pleased with the iMac's latest success, not only because the D&AD awards are highly prestigious, but also because they hail from his (supposedly) native England. (We strongly suspect that Ive has also won design awards from whatever planet he's really from, though we're unlikely to hear about that any time soon. But rest assured that his own species considers him a credit to their homeworld.) On top of that, we imagine that he's also tickled pink that the iMac shares the product design spotlight with another consumer appliance that's near and dear to his heart. And cute though it may be, we don't mean the Audi TT Coupé. We're talking about none other than the Space Toilet.

Longtime AtAT fans may recall that Ive has had a long and varied design career, and last September a PC World interview revealed that Ive can in fact list "toilet design" on his extensive résumé. To be sure, Ive went so far as to wax eloquent about the similarities between designing a toilet and creating the iMac: "Just like a toilet, it was important that the function of the iMac as a PC be apparent from its form." And what better toilet to stand proudly with the iMac than the Space Toilet? Sadly, the Space Toilet, with its corner-fitting tank, appears to be so named because it saves space, not because it comes from space. At least, that's what they want you to think... We bet it flushes great in zero gravity.

We at AtAT have long been fascinated with urban legends, those great "friend of a friend" stories that seem to stick around forever despite being, in many cases, completely false. False they may be, but in many cases the balance of the story is so perfect that the really sticky urban legends click into the archetypes of the collective unconscious and refuse to let go. Civilization will collapse and the human race will retreat back into the trees before people stop telling the one about the guy who got drunk in a bar and woke up in an ice-packed hotel room bathtub only to discover fresh surgical stitches where black-market organ traders harvested one (or both!) of his kidneys. (We swear, this really happened to the guidance counselor of our cousin's hairdresser's roommate!)

Similarly, there are many, many rumors floating around in the Mac world that just won't die. There's the one that says that Apple is porting the Mac OS to Intel hardware. There's the one about how they're preparing to ship Apple-branded Wintel systems. There's the one that says Steve Jobs is really a telepathic alien clone who feeds off of employee paranoia waves. (Well, okay, that one's ours, but it should be a widespread undying rumor, dammit.) Then there's all that stuff about consumer portable wireless Internet access, Apple set-top boxes, DVD-and-FireWire-enhanced iMacs-- you name it, it's out there. But one that keeps cropping up over and over again is the rumored "Red Box" of Mac OS X (which, at some point in its development life, was known in one form as Rhapsody Unified). Simply put, you know that the Yellow Box runs the "new" software, and the Blue Box runs the "old" software for compatibility's sake. The Red Box was rumored to run Windows software, giving the Mac OS a built-in emulator that would open up the whole range of Windows applications to the Mac OS.

Yes, the Red Box rumors have surfaced again, this time in the form of a pretty believable report on Think Secret. Apparently the latest incarnation of the story is that Apple's considering a complete buyout of Connectix and/or Insignia to ship VirtualPC/SoftWindows on every Mac once Mac OS X is out; the G4's will be fast enough to emulate Windows with plenty of speed for everyday tasks. It could happen. Interestingly enough, we're now having a really tough time connecting to Think Secret's server. Are those Apple-funded ninja hit squads out whacking "questionable" rumors sites again? Perhaps Think Secret just got a little bit too close to the truth. Now if you'll excuse us, we have to go dry our wet dog in the microwave...

Have you been keeping track of just how long we've all been waiting for a new PowerBook? Seriously-- it's been a year since we've had the excitement of a fresh new portable. The PowerBook G3 Series was introduced exactly one year ago, on the same day that the iMac said hello again; since then, we've had some speed bumps and some graphics upgrades, but the PowerBook itself is basically still the same old Wall Street model. Not that its sleek black curves aren't still exciting, but they're a little... familiar. Meanwhile, the consumer portable is nowhere to be found, and Lombard/101/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is still waiting in the wings.

Which is probably why people seem so desperately willing to glom onto any little piece of information about these new PowerBooks, which we sincerely hope will be introduced at next week's WWDC. For instance, apparently Mac OS Rumors posted some photos earlier today that were supposedly shots of the new 101, but we were asleep at the browser and by the time we got there, the photos had been pulled after they had been determined to be fakes. Luckily for us, O'Grady's PowerPage has left the pictures up, ostensibly on the premise that any 101 info, even info known to be spurious, is better than none at all. After all, if we can't have the real deal, why not chow down on mock 101?

So, yeah, the picture isn't really 101, although the handle is sort of a nice touch, and the curves are kinda neat, too. Still, we're a little surprised that anyone could have thought that these pics were genuine; they just don't look right, and there's the whole issue of missing media bays and whatnot. Again, we think people are just getting a little too anxious for info, so we'll be real glad when Apple finally decides to end our misery and ship the darn thing. Really, this is just too cruel.