It refuses to die, and frankly, we should have seen it coming. Anyone who lived through the COS fracas of 1997 should have recognized all the earmarks of a Hoax With Legs. You may recall that the COS scam-- the alleged $99 "alternative Mac OS" that claimed full compatibility with existing applications, quadruple the speed of Apple's operating system, full memory protection, multiprocessor support, and a raft of other features, all crammed into 12 MB on disk and a 4 MB RAM partition-- persisted beyond all reasonable lengths of time for one reason and one reason alone: it exploited the platform's need for a modern Mac OS back when Rhapsody (er, we mean Mac OS X) was still years away. And with the Xtrem Mac story now being covered by news organizations as disparate as WIRED, ZDNet, and TechWeb, it's plain to see that in 2000 the way to make a Mac hoax last is to tap into the latest fear plaguing the community: stagnant chip speeds. The G4 is still stuck at 500 MHz, and faster versions may be more than six months away-- and still probably won't top 900 MHz even then. So, announce you've got a 1.2 GHz Mac (coincidentally just a hair speedier than the fastest chip Intel's managed to crank out so far), and the suckers come a-runnin'.

Adding fuel to the fire is Xtrem's web site-- too professional-looking for your average hoax-- and the latest kicker: an honest-to-gosh press release sent out over PR Newswire. That's not exactly cheap-- and most purveyors of "joke"-style hoaxes aren't generally willing to invest actual cash to keep the gag rolling. Clearly, the folks at Xtrem have something financial to gain by propagating the myth of the 1200 MHz G4. Are they simply harvesting the email addresses of interested parties signing up for more info? Maybe, privacy policy or no privacy policy. But more likely, they're masters of misdirection who are using the media typhoon attracted by the 1200 MHz G4 as free publicity for their other product-- the $80 MacThrust, which claims to deliver instant speed boosts to existing Macs by running the G3 or G4 processor at a higher clock speed.

While there's no info on the MacThrust at the Xtrem web site other than the sparse marketing blurb contained in the press release itself, clip-on overclocking mechanisms have been around for years-- they even used to be widely available in the Mac mail-order catalogs for 680x0- and 601-based Macs. So what if this Swedish company took a standard, widely-used technology, built a product out of it, targeted it at the Mac market, and then concocted a second fictional product intended solely to grab people's attention? We have two words for you: bait and switch. (Okay, that's three words. Shut up.)

So far, that's the explanation that makes the most sense to us. If there's anyone out there who seriously believes that Xtrem has super-cooled a standard G4 to run at 1200 MHz, we've got a few copies of COS to sell you. Meet us on the Brooklyn Bridge-- we'll throw that into the bargain, too. A clip-on overclocker for existing Macs is one thing; that's well within the realm of the doable. But no one's going to convince us for a second that the 1.2 GHz PowerPC 7400 is anything but an attention-getting scam until the thing actually ships. As for the MacThrust, if it's a real product (it's already missed the "late July" ship date listed in the press release), we'd still be a little paranoid about using it. Personally, we wouldn't buy a dog biscuit from people making the claims Xtrem is making, let alone something they expect us to attach to the processors in our Macs to push them faster than they've been designed to run. What are we, the Gullible Risk Duo? We'll let the others go first, thanks very much.

Besides, MacThrust aside, we've already gone on the record with our staunch belief that the Xtrem Mac is nothing but a hoax, and we don't plan to backpedal. We will continue to consider the Xtrem Mac a hoax until the company proves otherwise. Heck, we'll probably stick firm on the hoax theory even if Xtrem does ship a 1.2 GHz Mac later this year-- though at that point we'd admit that the company was certainly willing to go to great lengths to perpetuate the scam, what with actually building working systems and shipping them and all. Now that's commitment!

We'd be the first to admit that Mac OS Rumors is not what it once was. Few would argue that it's long been supplanted as "the" Mac rumors site by AppleInsider, which, despite being updated less frequently, generally seems to have far more reliable information. MOSR, once a daily treasure trove of Mac-related insider tidbits, now appears to be trading on its past glory. Each and every time we link to it these days, we get at least one message from a viewer asking why we'd ever link to a site that "just makes stuff up."

Well, there are a couple of reasons. For one thing, we're not averse to fiction. Heck, we just make stuff up; of course, we don't try to make you think we're telling you the truth, either, so maybe that's not quite the same situation. But the main reason is, we still find MOSR tremendously entertaining at times. If you don't look to it as an actual informational source, it can make for some pretty enjoyable reading.

For instance, take the latest scoop over there: "OS X Public Beta may not make cut for Seybold." That's right; the long-awaited public beta of Mac OS X might not be done in time for Steve to toss copies into the crowd when he delivers his keynote address on August 29th. It seems that, "barring a major surprise," Apple's heavily-caffeinated engineers will have to face Steve's terrible wrath and "push back the release to mid-September."

Clearly, a September release of the Mac OS X beta would be a crushing blow to everyone in the Mac community. We all bet the farm, organized the militia, and arranged our summer travel plans assuming, naturally, that the beta would be done in time for Seybold, no matter what. After all, when Steve himself publicly announced in his last keynote a mere three weeks ago that the beta would ship in September, what else were we supposed to think but "August 29th"? We can only hope that MOSR is making this up, because if Apple misses its never-announced August 29th ship date and slips to its publicly-announced September ship date, well, heads are gonna roll in Cupertino.

When quantifying corporate assets, you can talk about quarterly revenues, gross margins, inventory levels, cash on hand, market capitalization, and a slew of other financial-type numbers that generally sends people like us to sleep faster than C-SPAN's sixteen-hour blockbuster "American-Croatian Relations Marathon." But beyond the numbers, you get into the realm of intangibles-- the touchy-feely stuff that doesn't show up on the quarterly balance sheet. In Apple's case, for instance, there's the Steve Factor. If Steve were to walk tomorrow, Apple would take a huge hit... but if the company were to find a replacement willing to work for a dollar a year (plus the occasional jet), the numbers wouldn't necessarily register the vast, Steve-sized hole in Apple's corporate armor. Until the stock started to tank, that is.

Similarly, consider Apple's brand. That little monochromatic formerly-rainbow-colored logo is one of the most recognizable symbols in the industrialized world. Furthermore, Apple's managed to cultivate a feeling to attach to the logo and brand-- one of creativity, of fun, of thinking differently. It's probably the third-most-popular aftermarket symbol affixed to motor vehicles after the Jesus fish and a "Calvin and Hobbes" character urinating on the Ford logo. Well, okay, maybe not-- but it's still one darn popular little symbol. And you just can't put a price tag on that kind of brand recognition.

Or can you? According to Macworld UK, a company called Interbrand has done just that, calculating "brand values" for its "World's Most Valuable Brands Survey." Reportedly these guys assign a value to a brand as a function of the company's "market capitalization, revenues and other performance measurements." That doesn't sound like a great way to quantify the worth of Apple's brand to us, but maybe we shouldn't complain: Apple apparently pulled the "highest percentage change in value for any brand in the computer industry from 1999 to 2000," jumping from 4,283,000 to 6,594,000. Apple's brand currently ranks 36th overall, and 11th in just the tech division. While we have no idea what that means, it sure sounds impressive, doesn't it?