Strangeness is afoot! Remember late last Thursday when some poor web lackey over at Apple accidentally posted a wrong image file to the Apple Store and thusly spilled the beans on the Power Mac G5 four days early? Specifically, what happened was that the header graphic said "Choose your Power Mac G4", but the list of specs underneath described the G5. About twenty seconds after this happened, screenshots of the revealing error were posted on fully three-quarters of all web pages on the 'net. Thirty seconds after it happened, Steve Jobs calmly pointed out the error to the culpable employee and then tore off his right arm and bludgeoned him to death with it.

But now the Stevenote is over, the G5 is no longer a secret, and we can all put this fascinating series of events behind us, right? Nuh-uh. Because faithful viewer Blondie-Wan sent us this screenshot last night, showing the Apple Store once again displaying the wrong graphics-- only this time it's reversed: the header says G5 like it should, and the specs say G4. (Note: the linked graphic may well be fixed by the time you see this.)

Now, we're not exactly suspicious people, mind you, but it did seem a little odd to us that Apple's web crew could have made exactly the same image-swapping mistake that one of them made last Thursday (only in reverse), especially following the loud and messy demise of one of their ilk mere days earlier. Just four days later, and they're making the same slip-up as their fallen comrade? What, are they heavy with the death wishes over there? So just to confirm Blondie-Wan's story, we went over to try to buy a G5 ourselves. We went to the main Apple Store page, clicked the big G5 graphic, and got... this. Yes, folks, that there is a bona fide (though heavily compressed) screenshot of the Apple Store correctly showing the G5 specs graphic-- under a header graphic that reads "Step 1: Select Your Power Macintosh G3."

Let us just say this: yes, we frequently make stuff up for entertainment purposes, but what we're telling you here is the unvarnished truth. This capture is totally legit and was taken on Tuesday, June 24th at 12:05 AM EDT. It was cropped and JPEG-compressed to save bandwidth, but it wasn't altered in any other way. When we tried visiting the Apple Store again just a couple of minutes later, the graphics were correct once more. If it weren't for the screenshot we took, we'd think we had been seeing things. (The independent reports and screenshots from faithful viewers Yoshiki-san and Don Modro which rolled in while we were working on this scene helped a lot, too.) And since then we've also gotten corroborating eyewitness reports on the first mix-up from faithful viewers Matt Selchow and Jona Gold-- and encountered it ourselves.

So yeah, apparently files are flying every which way in Apple's server room and it's only a matter of time before the Apple Store illustrates the new G5 with a picture of a horsey. At this point we see several interesting possible explanations for why Apple can't seem to keep the names and descriptions of its various Power Macs straight in its own online store:

• These latest graphic-switching hijinks are the work of the ghost of the dismembered and skull-crushed web lackey, now a poltergeist who haunts Apple's servers and mischievously renames image files from beyond the grave.

• Those grief-stricken Apple web lackeys left alive are moving images around in a defiant act of solidarity with their fallen coworker, and will soon be dealt a similar fate.

• The web lackey who made the Thursday Night Error was in fact not killed, but actually granted mercy and given a second chance-- but flubbed it badly last night and is even now being fed head-first into an industrial-size meat grinder.

• It's all Akamai's fault. We mention this as a distinct possibility because we just wound up with the "G5 header/G4 specs" bug ourselves, and while the Akamai-cached graphic is the incorrect G4 version, the Apple original correctly describes the G5.

• Steve's just screwing with our heads.

We're kinda leaning towards the last one, ourselves. Hi, Steve!

Anyone who's been skulking around here for a longish while already knows this, but apparently it bears repeating: sometimes we're kinda slow to "get it." For example, when the iPod first came out, we weren't terribly excited-- but now if you were to attempt something so foolhardy as to pry our iPods from our white-knuckled grasp, you'd better come at us with nothing less lethal than a howitzer strapped to all 96 episodes of "Small Wonder," because otherwise you'd be dead before you hit the floor. In other words, we have a history of lukewarm first impressions eventually morphing into varying degrees of rabid fandom. Which means that someday we might end up being raving iChat AV addicts, despite the fact that less than twenty-four hours ago we considered videoconferencing to be one of those prime examples of essentially pointless technology that exists purely for technology's own sake.

So here's what happened last night: we had a Sony DCR-TRV11 MiniDV camcorder sitting around, and the iChat AV beta was right there for the downloading, so we figured we should at least give it a try. And we'll say this: it looks to us like Apple got it right. Before long and with minimal fuss, we had an honest-to-goodness video chat running with faithful viewer and friend Shane Burgess, whom we hadn't seen since the Great AtAT Wedding of 2001. (Longtime viewers will recall a time when we actually had planned hiatuses.) The quality of the video was, frankly, outstanding, and while the experience wasn't quite like being in the same room as him, it was probably the closest we were going to get without driving forty minutes across state lines.

Circumstances and the laws of time, space, and dimension being what they are (curse you, laws of time, space, and dimension!), without iChat AV, we probably could've gone another decade without seeing Shane "in person." And then there's faithful viewer Iron Giant, whose friend lives in some town called Haynes, Alaska. Apparently Haynes is all set up with AirPort-compatible wireless access, so the Giant's friend just hooked up a webcam to his PowerBook, fired up iChat DV, and gave the Giant a virtual tour of the city. Quoth Mr. Giant-- from his humble abode a gazillion miles away in Arkansas-- "I was waving at people in the street and everything! It rocked!" Hmmmm... maybe there's something to this, after all.

That said, we still think that David Foster Wallace was pretty much right when he described the fundamental problems of videophone technology for everyday conversations (e.g. you actually have to look interested), so we tried the audio-only chat option, too-- with legendary AtAT semi-intern and mascot Nico (longtime viewers will recall Nico from when we actually had time to update Viewer Mail)-- and were glad to find that it works just fine, as well. And being able to mix video and audio chats with traditional text-based instant messaging is a spiffy way to get past the modern problem of having to read someone a URL or email address over the phone. All of which leads us to believe that iChat AV isn't just a chat program with a few gimmicky extras thrown in; it's striving to be a complete real-time communications package with features that scale appropriately to whatever its users need at the time.

Or it's just a handy way for distant strangers to get naked with each other. You decide.

ERRATUM: Yesterday we indicated that the Big, Mysterious Boxes that had been delivered to Apple resellers and retail stores over the course of the past week were found to contain celebratory mimes. We have since been informed that this is not the case, and that they instead contain new, cheaper Power Mac G4 models. We apologize for the error, but we think you'll agree that it was a natural mistake to make, seeing as the average mime bears a striking resemblance to Apple's last Power Mac model, what with both sporting white makeup, black leotards, and mirrored drive doors.

So yeah, this is kind of interesting; Apple finally announced the Power Mac G5 yesterday, but won't actually ship any until August. So does the company just plan to write off any and all potential Power Mac sales until then? Nope. If you sally forth to the Apple Store, try to ignore the Power Mac G5's looming presence for a moment, and scroll waaaay to the bottom, away from all the other hardware, you'll find that the Power Mac G4 does, indeed, live on-- wedged in right under Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro. These are the new Power Macs that were apparently arriving in "DO NOT OPEN 'TIL MONDAY" boxes last week, and if you're in the market for a zippy new Power Mac but you either can't wait until August or you're trying to save a few bucks, they may be for you.

For a measly $1299 (that's like, what, three lattés at Starbucks?), you get a 1.25 GHz G4, 256 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, a RADEON 9000 Pro graphics card, a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive, and support for booting into something called "Mac OS 9" (whatever the heck that is). If you need more speed, shell out $300 more and add a second processor and a lot more cache. When you think about it, that's a lot of muscle for the moolah-- maybe not compared to the G5, but you can get one of these right now and save yourself several hundred clams, to boot.

You're still going to wait, aren't you? Ah, we don't blame you. But you're passing up an otherwise good deal...