We're sure you've heard the news by now-- Apple's legal team has found themselves yet another case to keep them busy, only this time they're the ones on the attack. According to a short but sweet press release, Apple doesn't plan to sit back and smile meekly while other companies sully the iMac's good reputation by building cheap imitations. You know Future Power, the start-up Wintel company that unveiled their E-Power iMac knock-off a couple of weeks back? Well, the E-Power may come in five hues curiously similar to the iMac's fruit flavors, but as of now, you can color Future Power "sued." (Okay, so "Sued" isn't in the Crayola Big Box. We imagine it's probably a pale, sickly green.)

If you haven't seen Apple Insider's series of photos of the E-Power, you may not be aware of just how closely the E-Power resembles the iMac-- it's like the iMac's long-lost uglier twin. It's the same shape, uses the same two-tone coloring scheme, comes in the same five colors, has the same power button on the front panel, uses the same translucent power and USB cables, etc. If Apple only needs to demonstrate to the court that the E-Power might cause confusion among consumers who see an iMac billboard and hustle off to the store to buy one, this may well be one of the shortest court cases in history. Ever seen a jury deliberate for less than four seconds?

According to a MacWEEK article, a Future Power spokesperson claims that their legal defense will essentially amount to claiming that they didn't copy the iMac at all; they just wanted to make an all-in-one computer, and the E-Power's design is the natural result of trying to maintain a small footprint. In other words, there's nothing special about Apple's design because anyone building an all-in-one computer would have come up with exactly the same thing. Um, yeah-- just like anyone building such a machine would naturally offer it in five translucent colors? Bzzzt, thanks for playing. Future Power's defense is about as laughable as their original contention that they couldn't be sued: "You know why they can't sue us? Because there is a big difference-- our machine has a floppy." Well, guess what, guys? You've been sued. We know, we know-- we were shocked, too. And here we thought any company that builds a computer with a floppy drive was automatically immune from lawsuits. Well, we all learn something new every day, right?

Whom to believe? Rumors of a Power Mac G4 delay are surfacing once again; a few weeks ago the whispers focused on how Motorola had allegedly fallen far behind schedule in its development of the actual PowerPC G4 chips that will eventually fuel Apple's next-generation systems, once widely expected sometime this fall. For what it's worth, a Motorola spokesperson came forward and flatly denounced those rumors, stating that the G4 was still well on track for its scheduled volume shipments sometime in the third quarter of this year, and not six months later as the rumors claimed. Since Apple's progress on the "Sawtooth" motherboard for the Power Mac G4 seemed to be fine, we once again thought it was pretty safe to assume that we could budget for a speedy new G4 sometime late this fall-- assuming Motorola wasn't bluffing.

Except that now The Register is reporting that Apple's G4 boxes aren't likely to surface before sometime next year, supposedly by Apple's own admission. A source who attended a Toronto promotional shindig thrown by Apple and Adobe claims that Apple's own representatives repeatedly said that the G4s would "not begin shipping until at least May 2000." May?! Pardon our impatience, but Apple's been shipping G3-based systems for a long time now, and we just feel that's a tad late to move up to the next level, assuming that Motorola can get them the chips six months earlier. Either Apple knows something that Motorola's not voicing publicly, or maybe there are problems with Sawtooth development that haven't leaked out of Cupertino yet.

Of course, since Apple hasn't even announced a Power Mac G4 yet, we're definitely not going to get any official comment from them, but it's also certainly possible that the Apple staffers at the Toronto event were simply misinformed, or working from older information. (We can't tell you how many times an Apple representative at Macworld Expo has given us blatantly incorrect information. It happens.) Or maybe it's another case of Apple planning to underpromise and overdeliver. Or maybe the whole rumor is a ruse in the first place. Perhaps Apple will have something to say about upcoming G4 Macs at Expo; we can hardly wait to hear what the party line is by then.

Are you itching to get your hands on one of these new-fangled Apple-Palm organizers that keep surfacing in rumors? Recently it's been widely reported that while prototype fruit-flavored units have been spotted around Apple's campus, Apple has had to pull resources off the project in order to get the "P1" consumer portable finished and out the door. Still, it's nice to think that Apple really is working on a successor to the ill-fated Newton, even if it turns out to be nothing more than a standard Palm in a colorful case with an Apple logo-- though, if it were, why would Apple have any resources dedicated to it at all? (We're hoping for so much more than just an Apple logo slapped onto a regular Palm, but we're trying not to get our hopes up too far.)

Now we're wondering just how much involvement Apple really has with the development of these elusive little PDAs. A MacCentral article cites a Reuters report about Palm's new president, Alan Kessler, in which a Palm spokesperson publicly states that the company is about to release "Palm computing devices in different colors, à la the popular iMac from Apple Computer Inc." Just one of those little things that makes you say "huh." So now we're trying to figure out whether this is some reference to the Apple-Palm collaboration, or if it's just Palm jumping on the "Now in Translucent Colors!" bandwagon along with everyone else making consumer electronic devices with plastic cases.

Despite the reports that Apple has had to put the Palm unit on the back burner in order to complete P1 development, we've heard more than a few whispers that we will see a big Apple-Palm announcement at the Expo in three weeks. Hmmm, could this be the "big non-Mac announcement" that is rumored to be moving the keynote address from the Javits Center to 30 Rockefeller Plaza? (Probably not, but it's still fun to wonder...)