The fun never stops with the Fun Factory™. It's only been a few weeks since a brash young upstart called Future Power unveiled their latest innovation: an all-in-one Wintel box called the "E-Power" that, shall we say, "somewhat resembles" Apple's own iMac. And if you replace the phrase "somewhat resembles" with the phrase "looks exactly freakin' like" and tack an "except a buttload uglier" onto the end, you probably have a clearer picture. If you're really a glutton for righteous indignation and the perversion of a great design into a cheap and ill-conceived shadow of its former self, well, you can always check out Apple Insider's extensive E-Power photo collection. Even more unbelievable is the sheer unmitigated gall of Future Power to claim that they did not steal the iMac's design when they fashioned their system, but came up with the whole thing on their own. Heck, if Apple hadn't have sued these guys, we'd probably have had to launch a special AtAT black ops task force to go smack 'em around a little. Sheesh.

Anyway, so even as Apple's lawsuit is pending, would you doubt for a minute that another Wintel cloner would leap into the fray with yet another iMac rip-off? This one's not quite as blatant as the E-Power, but if you think it's not a designer knock-off, you're kidding yourselves. The Sotec e-one is being sold in Japan at roughly the iMac's price point, and a single glance should be enough for anyone to guess what machine it's trying to evoke. But what intrigues us most is the way that Mac fans seem far less outraged by Sotec's attempt than by Future Power's; the Mac Observer write-up is downright kind, calling it "less of a rip-off" and a system that "does not go so far to plagiarize Apple's design concepts." That's faint praise indeed, since the only way to create more of a rip-off than the E-Power would be for some manufacturer to break into an LG manufacturing plant, steal a slew of iMac cases, and throw some PC guts in them...

But while we only have the one photo to go by, from what we can tell, the Mac Observer's right-- this ain't no iMac. Sure, it has the same translucent plastics and the same blue-and-white two-tone color scheme as the iMac, and it comes with a translucent blue-and-white keyboard and mouse, and it features the familiar all-in-one design complete with the front-mounted speakers and the blue-button-in-the-center CD-ROM drive, etc. But look at the different (oops, we mean "innovative") placement of the colors themselves! That's not the same as the iMac. And the truncated case with the handle sticking up all funny? That's definitely not an iMac; actually, it kind of looks to us like an iMac that was hatched before it was finished developing. But consider this: if Future Power had never shown the E-Power first, wouldn't you be a lot more incensed about the e-one (yes, even the name is innovative!)'s release?

It was a good day for the hardcore Mac gamers out there. See, while Apple's done a lot in the past year to encourage the development of more games for the Mac platform, the hardware side of the equation hasn't been adding up. Serious fans of the wildly popular run-around-in-3D-and-shoot-things genre (which includes smash hits like the Quake series, Unreal, etc.) and other 3D games really need some extra oomph to make the experience more immersive-- and just as important as a fast processor is some kickin' dedicated 3D hardware acceleration.

Now, while Apple's done some nice things in the 3D realm, like embracing OpenGL as a development standard and putting ATI RAGE hardware in every Mac, the fact is, a lot of gamers want the ability to use even faster cards with even nicer feature sets; the RAGE 128 in the new Power Mac G3 is nice enough, but for gaming use, it's still a tad slower than 3dfx's Voodoo 2 (and now there's Voodoo 3). And if you're a gaming connoisseur, the RAGE Pro in the iMac is barely adequate for many of the newest games. And if you've got an older PCI-based Mac, the news is even worse; ATI is inexcusably six months late shipping its RAGE 128 cards, the only company making Mac Voodoo cards recently folded, and there are precious few other alternatives right now.

So it's 3dfx to the rescue; they've posted a free set of unsupported Mac drivers for Voodoo 2 cards. That means you can run out and buy a PC Voodoo 2 card and run it in your PCI Mac. (Voodoo 3 support is coming later.) In fact, not only can you pick up a PC Voodoo 2 card for about $60 (versus the outrageous $200-$350 Micro Conversions charged for the Mac version before they went under), you can even buy two, link 'em together, and yield even better performance-- it's called SLI, it was promised by Micro Conversions for a year, and it was never delivered (until now). Yes, for less than the cost of a single MC card, you can now have two Voodoo 2's pumping polygons to your screen. Don't expect technical support, though, either from the card manufacturer ("You're using it in a whatintosh?") or from 3dfx themselves. Still, that's not going to stop the serious Mac gamers out there from cranking up their frame rates for cheap. Now check out Accelerate Your Mac!'s extensive set of benchmarks and instructions, break your piggy banks, buy those cards, and go frag yourselves some PC users. ;-)

Can't you just smell it? Macworld Expo is here. Lots of workshops and town meetings and the like will be held on Tuesday, but for our money, the show doesn't really start until Steve Jobs takes the stage to deliver his keynote address on Wednesday morning-- an event that we can now count down in hours without exhausting all the fingers and toes of the AtAT staff. Yes, we're excited. Yes, we're pumped. Yes, we're more than a little scared of being frightfully let down after all the hype that's been built up. Still, our bags are packed, our batteries are charged, and we're ready to hit the road.

We have a feeling that even Steve won't fully know what Steve's going to say until scant minutes before he actually walks out on stage on Wednesday, but there's no end of speculation. For those keeping score, we like Mac the Knife's overview of the likeliest announcements-- it's short, sweet, and to the point. (Get it? Knife? Point? Please don't hit us.) Here's the quick rundown: P1. MyApple.com. Outlook Express 5. Oracle support. Palm. Swatch. And maybe even a new iMac.

So that's what may or may not be in store for us all, and the only sure thing is that there are no sure things until the info travels from Steve's mouth to our eager awaiting ears. Now if you'll excuse us, we're off to the Big Apple (in more ways than one). Tune in all week for AtAT's Adventures in New York, which we're sure will rate somewhere on the entertainment scale between the Bradys' visit to Hawaii and the Saved By The Bell outing to Las Vegas. In tomorrow's episode: the AtAT Guide to Collecting Expo Swag. Don't miss it!