All right, 'fess up-- which one of you stole the iBook? According to Mac OS Rumors, some shameless and daring individual managed to "liberate" one of the 200 pre-production iBooks from the Apple booth at last week's Expo. If the report is true, then it was a pretty impressive-- if despicable-- feat; the fifty iBooks scattered throughout the crowd at the keynote address to demonstrate AirPort wireless networking were physically tethered to the Apple representatives who wielded them. And while the ones displayed at Apple's booth were only chained to the countertops with a thin, easily-cuttable wire, the throngs of rabid iBook enthusiasts crowding around every unit should have made theft a downright impossibility. (Then again, we know a gentleman who once stole a watermelon from the local supermarket on a dare by simply shoving the thing under his sweater and walking out as if nothing was out of the ordinary. It's amazing what the "right" attitude can accomplish.)

Now, we have to say, this kind of wacky, consequences-be-damned, temporary-insanity-driven heist has AtAT-Fan fingerprints all over it. So if the perpetrator is out there in our faithful viewing audience, we'd just like to say, we're here for you, buddy. We know that you were just swept up in the moment; the Apple rep turned his back to address somebody's questions about why the iBook is so freakin' heavy, and that little devil appeared on your left shoulder whispering that it wasn't too heavy to shove into your big yellow Iomega shopping bag and walk away with no one the wiser. (The little angel appeared on your right shoulder, too, but it was too busy drooling over the iBook's Blueberry curves to tell you to do the right thing.) So you walked off with an iBook prototype-- everyone makes mistakes. And we don't see why you should have to spend the rest of your life in a virtual hell of guilt and self-loathing just because you had a momentary lapse of judgment. Heck, anyone could've made the same mistake. Those iBooks were downright irresistible.

So we want to help, we really do. Here's the deal: contact us at our studios, and we'll arrange for you to ship the purloined portable to us. We, of course, will turn right around and ship the unit back to Apple's labs, where it belongs. Don't worry, we'll scrub your fingerprints off of it first, and we'll keep your identity confidential; we're sure Apple will just be happy to get it back. That is, if it doesn't get mysteriously lost in the mail on the way back to Cupertino... Stuff like that has been known to happen on occasion. Right?

Okay, we know that a slew of Mac fans rabid enough to tune into AtAT on a semi-daily basis probably doesn't want to keep hearing about Windows errors. Or maybe you do. But regardless, we just had to do a follow-up on yesterday's item about the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). For the uninitiated (and you don't know just how lucky you are), when Windows crashes hard, you're left staring at a solid blue screen with cryptic white error messages all over it. It happens in Windows 3.1, it happens in Windows 95/98, and, despite what Microsoft's marketing department might otherwise tell you, it happen in Windows NT, as well. So when Bill Gates publicly stated that Apple's only leadership position is in the area of color, we passed on faithful viewer David Puett's suggestion that Bill's plan is to take the lead in color variety by allowing the customization of the Windows error screen starting with Windows 2000. Big joke, right? Ha ha, and all that.

Except that it's apparently not fiction. First of all, faithful viewer John Rubbo seems to recall hearing that in Windows NT 5 (now known as Windows 2000), users will be able to customize the BSOD-- "you can put your business logo in its place. Glad to see they're making worthwhile improvements." Absolutely. Because let's be honest: what business with an NT-based product doesn't want their company logo prominently displayed whenever the system takes a nose dive? If this "feature" turns out to be true, we can picture quite a few Mac people who are forced to use Windows at work adding all kinds of fun graphics to the BSOD-- a picture of a pie-covered Gates, the Justice Department seal, the smiling Mac OS logo and the legend "I Wish I Were A Mac," etc.

But for those of you stuck in Windowsville now, you don't have to wait for Windows 2000 to dress up your error screens a bit. Faithful viewer Gary Turnbull pointed out an NTKnow article which proves that Microsoft is the true innovator when it comes to color choice: it's already possible to change some hidden Registry settings to give yourself "a Cyan Screen of Death, a Bright Yellow On Gray Screen of Death: any colour you want, as long as it's broke." Better yet, rather than dealing with all that tedious mucking about in the Registry, you can download BSOD Properties-- an easy-to-use program that promises to "eliminate the dreaded Blue Screen of Death FOREVER!" (By making it green, or purple, or... well, you get the idea.) Sadly, it doesn't work under Windows NT, which is probably why Microsoft is reportedly adding BSOD customizability to Windows 2000. So there you have it-- proof that Microsoft is really all about choice. Now get back to work, you.

Okay, sure, clock speeds in megahertz aren't even a remotely accurate way to gauge the relative speeds of two chips with different architectures. In many tests, a 450 MHz G3 absolutely trounces a 550 MHz Pentium III-- but try telling Joe Consumer that. Apple made a big push a while back to persuade the buying public that the G3 is "up to twice as fast," but we imagine a lot of people labor under the misguided impression that megahertz is an absolute rating of processor speed, and one look at the specs for Macs and similarly-priced or cheaper Wintel boxes tells them that the Wintels are "at least 100 faster." Frustrating, right? Now imagine how frustrated you'd be if you were a marketing guy at Apple...

So for Apple's sake, we at AtAT constantly dream of a day when the PowerPC performance lead is not only apparent when poring over obscure benchmark results, but also when taking a quick glance at raw processor clock speeds. The fastest shipping desktop Wintels currently house a 550 MHz Pentium III, we believe. Okay, so a Power Mac G3/450 is faster-- but imagine if it were a Power Mac G3/600 instead. Then there'd be no question about which was faster, whether you referenced benchmark results, real-world tests, or the common knowledge that "600 is more than 550." Too bad that's not going to happen anytime soon; the best we could (semi-)realistically hope for was a match in MHz at the high end. And for a brief period, it looked like the Mac might be catching up to Wintel in the MHz race: MacInTouch reported that Apple was preparing one of its anxiously-awaited "speed bumps" this Thursday, which would raise the processor speeds across the entire Power Macintosh line. The low-end system at $1599 would cruise along at 450 MHz, the mid-range systems would zoom forward to 500 MHz, and the $2999 high-end crusher would streak ahead to 550 MHz-- bringing parity to the Mac in the megahertz race.

Unfortunately, MacInTouch has since pulled the info about the speed bump, citing "conflicting dealer reports," so it's a distinct possibility that, while the Mac's PowerPC (arguably) holds the actual speed lead, it may be lagging in the megahertz running for quite a while longer. If we had to make a guess, we'd bet that a more moderate speed bump from 350/400/450 to 400/450/500 would be more likely-- if, indeed, a speed bump is in the cards at all this week. But in the meantime, we're just going to sit here with our fingers crossed, constantly reloading the Apple Store page, and hoping for some big numbers at some small prices...