Controversy junkies, rejoice! If your incredible thirst for overwrought conflict wasn't sated by the tussle over whether the industrial design of Apple's new iMac is a brilliant organic expression of the functional digital hub experience or just resembles a half-deflated volleyball with a nice LCD screen jammed through its top by virtue of a shiny stick, now you can top yourself off with the question of whether or not Apple may have swiped said design from a fan. How's that for a veritable cornucopia of tasty drama? It's like there's a party in my mouth and everyone's invited!

See, faithful viewer Rupert Chappelle breathlessly alerted us to a WIRED article which relates the story of one Vincent Jeunejean, a Belgian web designer who finds the look of Apple's new iMac startlingly familiar-- and not because he's got a thing for table lamps. It seems that ol' Vincent sketched his own concept design for an LCD iMac sometime last June, and it really is strikingly similar to what Steve just unveiled on Monday. There's just a plain stick instead of the new iMac's adjustable display arm, and you may have to squint a little to see a real resemblance, but if you look at it in the right light it's almost spooky: there's the dome-shaped base unit with the Apple logo on the front and the ports on the back, the pole coming out of the top, and the flat-screen display mounted centrally on the pole. Vincent's sketch is so close to the shipping product, in fact, that he believes that Apple flat-out copied it.

Now, before you start picturing Steve dispatching a team of ninjas to Belgium to break into Vincent's house just to swipe a rough sketch of a proposed iMac design, we should probably mention that Vincent had scanned his artwork and submitted it to The Apple Collection, so his design has been publicly accessible for over six months. Furthermore, The Apple Collection confirms via its log files that "Apple employees visit the site every week," and even if they didn't, well, Vincent also just happens to have emailed a copy directly to Steve Jobs.

So did Jon Ive, in a fit of "designer's block," steal Vincent's design? It hardly seems likely, since we have to assume that the basic elements of the new iMac were locked down well over six months ago for it to be (sort of) available now; Apple claims that the product has been in the works for two years. In any case, the point is most probably moot, since Apple's Unsolicited Idea Submission Policy is pretty ironclad: "(1) your ideas will automatically become the property of Apple, without compensation to you, and (2) Apple can use the ideas for any purpose and in any way, even give them to others." In other words, when Vincent emailed that sketch to Steve, he may well have given up any rights to the design.

All drama aside, there isn't anything so terribly outré about the essential design of Apple's new iMac (for the most part, it's just a logical form following function), so in all likelihood this is just a nifty coincidence. Chalk it up to great minds thinking alike, and who knows? Maybe Apple's industrial design gurus will offer Vincent a job...

Truth in advertising-- impossible, you say? While it's true that the whole point of marketing and advertising is generally to make a product seem much better (and therefore more necessary) than it really is, occasionally we're lucky enough to stumble upon some entity keeping the hyperbole out of its adspeak. For a while we thought Apple might become a shining example of a company whose marketing department had decided to keep its product claims tethered well within the realm of reality. We blame the iPod for getting our hopes up.

Yes, Apple teased the press before the unveiling by calling the iPod a "breakthrough" digital device, which is at least mildly debatable, but when it came down to the numbers, Apple played more than fair. For one thing, most digital audio players we've seen are advertised as being able to hold a lot more music than can be realistically expected. "Up to two hours of music!" they trumpet-- neglecting to mention that those two hours's worth of songs have to be encoded at a paltry 32 kbps, and will therefore sound like an AM transistor radio that's been set on fire. And battery life tends to be way overestimated as well.

However, with the iPod, Apple claimed it gives you "1,000 songs in your pocket." That assumes a very generous (and default in iTunes) 160 kbps encoding rate, and even then, it may be a bit of an underestimate; our iPod currently has 1,336 160 kbps songs on it. And whereas Apple claims that the iPod has a ten-hour battery life, we've easily gotten twelve hours of continuous play on a full charge. Clearly this heralds a new era of realism in the marketing blurbs, right?

But then we come to the new iMac, and a return to the old "it's true-- technically" school of marketingspeak. Specifically, faithful viewer jens@dna noticed that Apple claims that the new iMac has "five 12-Mbps USB ports" which let you "connect your iMac to hundreds of digital cameras, printers, scanners, external hard disks, and joysticks." If you've stared obsessively at the iMac from all angles (and really, who among us hasn't?), you already know that there are only three USB ports punched into the rear of the system. So what's with this "five" nonsense?

Well, it turns out that Apple is apparently counting the two USB ports on the included Pro Keyboard. There's just one little problem with that; you can plug all the scanners/printers/joysticks you want into the keyboard's USB ports and they're simply not going to work until you-- that's right-- plug the keyboard into one of the iMac's USB ports. Which means that while the iMac does have five USB ports, you can only use four of them. And then, of course, you still have to plug in the mouse...

So unless you're planning on controlling your new iMac via a telepathic link, those five USB ports are really three. Not that we're complaining, mind you, especially since that's still a 50% improvement over all prior iMacs, and any feeling we had that Apple was suddenly going to go all Polyanna with its marketing claims was entirely a product of our own psychosis. On a completely different note, did anyone else notice that the new iMac's LCD display magically "floats in mid-air"? Coooool.

We're getting an awful lot of mail from irate Mac users wondering whatever happened to those GHz-level Power Macs that many of us had been expecting this week. Specifically, lots of people are wondering why on earth Apple would expect anyone to shell out roughly $2300 for the current 733 MHz Power Mac G4 and a 15-inch display when they could save $500 by grabbing a new top-of-the-line iMac instead-- especially since the iMac has a faster processor, twice the RAM, 50% more storage space, and a SuperDrive, whereas all the Power Mac has is upgradeability, a faster system bus, and probably a bigger cardboard box. Something's gotta give.

Well, the Power Mac does have the added advantage of actually being available right now, but beyond that, you're right; it's tough to imagine why anyone would opt for one of the existing Power Macs over an iMac unless they absolutely need a larger display (or a larger cardboard box), have an addiction to PCI slots, need to spend a boatload of cash, or simply can't abide all that white. And therefore we won't be surprised if orders for Power Macs temporarily plunge straight through the floor as iMac pre-orders multiply like bunnies. But note that we said "temporarily."

We look at it this way: we consider it to be extremely unlikely that a company smart enough to cram an 800 MHz G4, a SuperDrive, a 15-inch LCD display, and a measly $1799 sticker price into an all-in-one design that's got most of the world taxing their salivary glands would somehow also be so brick-stupid as to forget that this snazzy little package might just totally and utterly cannibalize any and all potential Power Mac sales. It's often said that Einstein had trouble learning to tie his shoes, but we really don't think we're looking at some kind of Rain Man savant behavior, here. Apple has a plan; bet on it.

In fact, we'd we willing to make an educated guess that in all likelihood, those new Power Macs are done and ready to go, and that the only reason we haven't seen them yet is because Apple doesn't want anything to crash the iMac's coming-out party. iMac sales have slid badly in recent months, the new design needs to generate as much buzz as possible, and Macworld Expo is a consumer-oriented gig: all that adds up to "no Power Macs at Macworld." The cannibalization of some Power Mac sales is therefore a necessary evil, but we bet that Steve plans to yank those GHz Apollos out of his sleeve sometime around the end of the month-- say, perhaps, right before the very first iMacs are slated to ship. Here's hoping, anyway... for the sake of the quarterly balance sheet.