We're sure there are very few things that Steve Jobs values more highly than Apple's crack legal team, but corporate secrecy must be near the top of that short, short list. The reports of Steve's twisted and awful rage inflicted upon the hapless goofs at ATI for wrecking his Expo surprise are now legendary, and the subsequent resignation of ATI CFO James Chwartacky (as originally reported by faithful viewer Mike) seems like an awfully big coincidence to swallow. So, given that leaks about unannounced Apple products would appear to be Steve's single biggest rage trigger in life, we can only imagine his conflict and inner turmoil over Apple's new lawsuit intended to make an example of a leaker by stringing him up and eviscerating him-- er, litigationally speaking. On the one hand, Steve must love the idea of an NDA-violating little mole getting nailed to the proverbial wall-- but on the other, the lawsuit itself is now providing hints about the next cool stuff to issue forth from Apple's labs. (Put on your irony hats.)

See, according to a CNET article, the lawsuit (which is presumably a matter of public record) alleges that the mysterious "Worker Bee" posted information about three unreleased Apple products over the course of the past several months: the new Pro Mouse, the dual-processor Power Mac G4s, and-- this is the kicker, here-- "an as-yet unreleased Apple product." Well, of course that last part immediately had dozens of rumor hounds scouring the AppleInsider message boards, looking for anything and everything "Worker Bee" had posted on July 25th-- since Apple Legal was even kind enough to provide the date of the posting in question. Guess what? On that date, "Worker Bee" had posted "detailed specifications" of an upcoming iBook, which supposedly sports "up to 466 MHz, DVD, 1 FireWire port, [and] 8 MB of VRAM." Furthermore, he indicated that the "screen size will remain the same," while he "[didn't] know about new colors... yet."

Whoops! While that information might well have been lost in the swirling miasma of unsubstantiated rumors had it just been left alone, Apple's own lawsuit has now pretty much confirmed it as signal instead of noise. Which means that Steve is probably grinding his teeth down to stumps as he tries to resolve his emotional conflict: his legal team is trying to put an end to leaks once and for all, and for that its members should be treated to a round of fruit smoothies and maybe a few thousand stock options. But at the same time, they've gone and done just what Steve hates the most: they have, for all intents and purposes, told the world about an unreleased product. So after that round of fruit smoothies, by all rights, Steve should tear their throats out with a letter opener, thus sending those stock options on to the lawyers' next of kin.

Here's hoping it all ends happily for everyone concerned. After all, Apple Legal's sin wasn't particularly heinous-- but then again, from a detail standpoint, ATI's was arguably far less so, and those guys got slammed pretty hard. In any case, we all now have a pretty good idea of what Apple planned to unveil at next month's Apple Expo in Paris-- since the initiative to make that show into the European equivalent of a U.S. Macworld Expo requires that Steve roll out some new gear. Of course, now that the cat's out of the bag, we have to wonder if Steve will switch to a different surprise, instead...

Megahertz envy can make us do some crazy things. Here we are, Mac lovers a-plenty, proud of our platform and true 'til death-- but that niggling little issue of clock speed is like a scab that we can't stop picking. The G4 tops out at 500 MHz, while Intel (at least on paper) is flirting with 1130 MHz. We know that clock speed isn't an accurate measure of a processor's performance, we've seen the side-by-side speed tests, and now we even get two of those 500 MHz G4s for the price of one. (We can't really use that second processor for much other than Photoshop until Mac OS X comes out, but that's a whole different story.) Regardless, that whole "1130 >> 500" thing is caught like a bone in our throats.

So much so, in fact, that, as faithful viewer Jens Baumeister pointed out, someone spent an awful lot of time working up a web page announcing the Xtrem Mac-- a clone that allegedly has a 1200 MHz single-chip G4 running under its goofy-looking hood. In addition to that magical 1200 MHz G4, the Xtrem also packs a 150 MHz bus, a 320 MB/s SCSI RAID controller, 1.6 Gtexels/s graphics circuitry, and more. (There's no mention of what kind of networking or modem is included, but judging by the performance of the Xtrem web server, the blisteringly-fast Xtrem Mac boasts a state-of-the-art 1200 baud modem to match its 1200 MHz processor.) The fact that someone wanted a 1200 MHz Mac so badly that he or she took the time to "create" one on the 'net speaks volumes.

What's really revealing, though, is how many Mac users wrote to us saying "this can't be real... can it?" Despite the fact that we know that the G4 tops out at 500 MHz, despite the fact that 1200 MHz is so conveniently just a hair higher than the 1130 MHz now (sort of) available from Intel, despite the fact that Go2Mac points out that the Xtrem Mac is nothing more than a giant Shure 55SH Series II microphone-- megahertz envy won't let us dismiss the Xtrem as an outright hoax right away. It's wishful thinking at its finest.

By the way, while we never like to be the bearers of bad news, we've been getting more reports on the upcoming G4+ chip that Motorola's been working on so diligently. While yesterday we passed on some whispers that the G4+ might actually be available and running in the neighborhood of 800 MHz by the end of the year, people actually working at Motorola find that timetable a bit... well, "optimistic" would be the polite term. While we can't get into too much detail without risking someone's job, let's just say that, in reference to the current prerelease test batches of the G4+, the phrase "zero yield" figured prominently. Looks like it might be a mighty long winter. Hey, maybe we'll pre-order an Xtrem Mac after all.

As you know, even though AtAT's primarily a Mac-centric show, Microsoft makes frequent guest-star appearances. And it's not always gratuitous, what with Microsoft and Apple being bestest buddies after that infamous August 1997 "cease-fire"-- Microsoft does make Mac products, after all, and Apple also testified in the "Redmond Justice" trial, so that's another link right there. And now we've got yet another reason to put the Redmond Giant on the air: not satisfied with having copied the Mac interface, the QuickTime "brushed metal" look, the whole concept of iMovie, and countless other aspects of the Mac's software, Bill Gates has now resorted to stealing Steve Jobs's personal characteristics, as well.

See, in an interview with Red Herring kindly pointed out to us by faithful viewer Paul, Billy-boy makes several... interesting remarks. Most notably, he flat-out refers to the government's antitrust case against his company as "worse than dumb." In fact, he calls it "malicious," because it's "saying that the government can design software." Now, after having been subjected to Word 6 a few years ago, by Microsoft's standards we bet that the government could design software-- but that's beside the point. The point is that, after reading a bevy of quasi-paranoid/Napoleon-syndrome quotes like "Are you saying that anything AOL does is a threat to Microsoft?" and "Larry Ellison, Scott McNealy, and Steve Case... are the primary billionaires who have been behind [Redmond Justice] from the start," we have to agree with Paul that Bill has finally engineered his very own Reality Distortion Field. We also agree that, "unfortunately for Bill, his RDF apparently only works on himself."

Meanwhile, Bill should start looking up the French translation for "worse than dumb," because it looks like the "Redmond Justice" craze is about to hit Europe. Faithful viewer Malcom Sanders noted an Associated Press story about the European Union's brand-spankin'-new antitrust case against Microsoft, "alleging the software giant is abusing its market position in operating systems to dominate the market for server software." Sacre bleu! Time to tune that RDF, Bill-- and get it fitted for 220-volt power, while you're at it.