Say what you will about the mercurial Mr. Jobs; for all the stories about him blowing his stack and tearing out some poor underling's throat with his teeth, eyewitness sightings of him losing his cool in public are relatively scarce. Of course there have been a couple of exceptions; the time he encountered a booth selling Apple logo merchandise on the Expo show floor, for instance, and loudly demanded that the "unauthorized" gear be surrendered immediately. (Turns out the company still held a valid license, signed by Gil Amelio-- so Gil got the last laugh after all.) We also recall a live CNBC interview from a few years back that ended abruptly when he actually got up and walked out, because the interviewer asked him whether he'd ever become Apple's permanent CEO and they had apparently agreed that they "weren't going to talk about this." But even in that situation, he calmly got up and left instead of pitching a public hissy fit and lunging for the interviewer's jugular. Hey, what can we say? The man's a pro.

So we couldn't help but wonder what his behind-closed-doors reaction had been to ATI's humongous indiscretion. You'll recall that the graphics manufacturer spilled the beans about Apple's new iMacs and Power Macs in a press release just a day or so before Steve's big keynote; at the time we opined that Steve might be "miffed" at having his big surprise ruined. More likely, he was downright homicidal, and we wouldn't be surprised to hear that a few junior interns who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time wound up in body bags faster than the Red Shirts on Star Trek.

Publicly, though, once he walked out on that stage, he didn't say anything bad about ATI. Unfortunately for the company, though, he didn't say anything good, either. In fact, he barely mentioned ATI at all, totally glossing over the graphics specs of the new hardware and conspicuously avoiding any and all mention of this new "Radeon" processor we were supposed to be so impressed with. Welcome to the icy world of Steve's ire, where the cold shoulder is the best you can hope for. Both AppleInsider and Inside Mac Games have immensely entertaining reports about ATI's huge gaffe and Steve's retaliation: in addition to scrubbing all references to the new Radeon from his keynote presentation (including a guest spot by an ATI executive who was supposed to demo the product), Iron Steve reportedly also demanded "all Radeons to be pulled from the show floor." Death by obscurity? You betcha.

So is this the end of ATI's long-standing and lucrative relationship with Apple? We wouldn't be at all surprised. The only problem is, NVIDIA may well be eager to grab Apple's OEM business, but any sort of transition on that scale is going to take time. Meanwhile, Apple's got all this new gear to ship, so some kind of truce with ATI is going to have to happen for business's sake. Suggestion to ATI: as an apology, send Steve a vegan Chocolate Ambrosia cake from Zenith on 8th Avenue. After sampling it on Thursday night, the AtAT staff is convinced that we'd forgive anything short of ethnic cleansing and forced Windows migration for a slice of that stuff.

Come on, now-- you'd think these people would have learned their lesson after Bondi Blue. A CNET article makes a big stink over third-party peripheral manufacturers who are reportedly shocked and dismayed that Apple has revamped the iMac color selection; now that Indigo, Ruby, Sage, Graphite, and Snow are the next hip thing, they're "left wondering what to do with all those USB hubs, CD-ROM drives and printer covers featuring last year's shades."

Say, that is a tragedy. As one manufacturer states, "I don't think changing the colors so quickly is such a good thing." And we totally agree; clearly no one could possibly have foreseen that a mere eighteen months after Apple introduced the original five fruit flavors, the company would just toss them out like so much brightly-colored trash. We always figured (and we don't think we're alone on this) that Apple would stick with the same five bright colors forever, because honestly, what company would actually change the colors of its products? Ford, for example, is a fine example of a staid and steady all-American company who knows the value of consistency; all of its cars are still available only in Model-T Black. You can just imagine the chaos that would ensue if the company did something as foolish as, say, make cars in new colors every single model year. There'd be rioting in the streets as befuddled consumers were driven mad by the sheer flightiness of it all. It'd be anarchy.

So, obviously we can sympathize with the peripherals manufacturers who, because of Apple's flaky move, are either going to have to try to market Blueberry CD-R drives to owners of Indigo iMacs, or (gasp) change their products to match the new colors. As for all that stock on hand, it's not their fault; how could these companies possibly have guessed that Apple might release new iMacs at the Expo (did anyone see that coming? 'Cause we just couldn't believe our eyes!) and that after only a year and a half the colors might be changed? They're now going to have to try to sell all that fruit-flavored stock to the couple of million owners of fruit-flavored iMacs, instead of to the obviously far more lucrative market consisting of the couple of thousand people who ordered the Indigo/Ruby/Sage/Snow models and might actually receive them soon. It's a real shame, and frankly, we think Apple should do something to compensate these poor accessory-makers for their losses. What are they supposed to be, mind-readers?

Praise the powers that be for the bounty they have granted us: namely, fodder to keep the Apple-Palm rumors alive for a few more weeks, albeit in a slightly revised form. Perhaps by now you've seen the report over at The Register about an upcoming "low-end" Palm OS device. What's interesting here is that, rather than hear for the umpteenth time that Apple's licensed the Palm OS and plans to release an Apple-branded Palm-based PDA that incorporates some of the finer elements of the cancelled Newton architecture, we find that The Register has turned the tables on us: rumor has it that this upcoming unit, code-named "Calvin," is Palm's baby-- but it'll sport some Newton technology presumably licensed from Apple. Woo-hoo!! Let the speculation fly!

Reportedly, Calvin is a 4MB handheld with a colored case that allows users to snap different faceplates on it to suit their mood (or wardrobe) for the day. Now, certainly the multiple colors angle is very Apple, but hang on, because it gets better. Calvin is expected to cost only $149 when it replaces the Palm IIIe sometime in the murky and unspecified future. Now, given the price point and the colors, Calvin (assuming it exists) is obviously targeted at Handspring's audience, who has been snapping up Visors like candy on Halloween. So what's going to differentiate Calvin from the Visor, other than the Visor's additional RAM and Springboard expansion slot? How about this: "the ability to write in your own handwriting and have the Palm translate it."

Folks, that phrase perfectly describes what the Newton tried to do in 1993 (and failed miserably) and finally accomplished commendably in about 1997, not long before the whole project got Steved. So what's the deal, here? Did Apple license the Newton's Rosetta handwriting recognition technology to Palm? And is this the scenario that reconciles Steve's comment that Apple has "been doing a lot of work with [Palm] lately" and Phil Schiller's remark that Apple isn't working on its own handheld product? Or better still, was Phil wrong (or lying)? Because we're sure you noticed that when Steve introduced the new six-sector product grid to accommodate the Cube, he left a nice big question mark in the new portable slot. Something's going on, and we can't wait to see what.