Hallelujah, they weren't just messing with us: our new PowerBook did, in fact, arrive last Wednesday, safe and sound; we were so pleased that we gave the UPS lady a big honkin' slice of chocolate chip banana bread fresh from the oven. We're producing this very episode on it right now, in fact (the PowerBook, not the banana bread), and after our limited experience with the thing so far, we're giving it a big thumbs-up with a cherry on top and a side order of cheesy fries. Sure, there's a bunch of little annoyances we're going to have to learn to work around and/or live with-- the space bar isn't as sensitive as it should be, the trackpad button is way too stiff, the clickable trackpad fails to register clicks every once in a while, for some reason double-clicking and dragging using the trackpad no longer allows us to select multiple words, etc.-- but overall, the screen is vast and gorgeous, the keyboard is the comfiest we can ever remember using, it's way quieter than the Pismo was, everything is insanely fast, and for some reason, most of the time this G4 running at 1.67 GHz is about a zillion degrees cooler than that 400 MHz G3; our thighs are barely breaking a sweat. Go figure.

But there's one more thing we're going to have to get used to, and that's the sheer size of the thing. We traded up for more screen real estate, but for some reason, we didn't expect that moving from a 14-inch Pismo to a 15-inch AlBook would deal us such a noticeable increase in width. Oh, the system's thin, sure, and relatively light, but it has a footprint easily mistaken for the big honkin' pedal impressions of a yeti with a pituitary problem. Obviously we'll adjust to it in time, but seeing as we've always been partial to Apple's teensiest laptops (the 12-inchers, the 2400, the old Duos, that sort of thing), right now this 15-incher feels like a boat by comparison. Using a 17-incher for the first time must feel like having an Imperial Star Destroyer perched jauntily in one's lap.

But what if Apple were to introduce a new portable product even smaller than the 12-inch PowerBook? The PowerPage reported last week that the company is working on a "new palmtop Mac" and (evidently unswayed by having been subpoenaed in that whole Asteroid brouhaha) cites "sources who claim to have seen one" when it describes the product as a "mini laptop." Reportedly it runs a "stripped-down flavor of Mac OS X" and finally capitalizes on the Inkwell handwriting recognition technology that's been a feature of X since Jaguar-- a feature better known by its alias, "What the Hell Is This Doing In Here?"

As the PowerPage points out, a super-teensy mini laptop with stylus-based handwriting input sounds a whole lot like the old Newton eMate 300. (The eMate, incidentally, was the one aspect of the entire Newton project that Steve Jobs actually liked, which may explain why the original iBook's design was basically an eMate on Miracle-Gro.) Is there a viable market for a debigulated semiBook that's almost a Mac? It's tough to say with no real details available, but reportedly the prototypes are "getting a lot of great feedback," and we personally can see the allure of a reduced-functionality, pocket-sized miniBook that we can take anywhere just to get some writing done-- because we sure as broccoli aren't going to be in the habit of dragging this big honkin' thing all over creation.

In the meantime, though, since we're not nearly as mobile as we once were, having 15 inches of widescreeny goodness across which our cursor can roam more than makes up for the temporary feeling of being dwarfed by our own laptop. Freedom! FREEEEEDOOOOOMM!!!

Speaking of those subpoenas, can we be honest? While we do loves us some o' that there Courtroom Drama™, frankly, we'll be more than a little relieved when these dual trade secret legal tussles get resolved one way or the other, because they've divided the Mac userbase like no issue since we were polarized by the whole "Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian: Was Steve Divinely Inspired or Just Seriously Stoned?" thing. Let's leave aside the suit against Think Secret for a moment and focus on the subpoenas: there's a big, fat line in the sand, and on one side you've got folks saying Apple's trampling the First Amendment by trying to compel a handful of Mac rumor sites to reveal their sources, while on the other there are those who say that any site who'd knowingly publish trade secrets for no reason other than to boost hit counts doesn't deserve the protection afforded to responsible journalists in the first place. Judging from the, er, strong language in feedback we've gotten on the subject, the whole thing's going to erupt in a nationwide knife-fight before much longer.

Well, for better or for worse, it looks like Apple has won its fight to identify the person or persons who leaked the Asteroid specs to AppleInsider, the PowerPage, and Think Secret. Faithful viewer Mac (no, seriously) tipped us off to a BBC News article which reports that Judge James Kleinberg has just ruled that Apple can, indeed, compel the ISPs of those sites to turn over their email records so that it can figure out just whom exactly it's suing in the first place. We imagine there's a Worker Bee or two doing a wholly different (and involuntary) kind of leaking right now, while preparing to flee the country in hopes of escaping the horrifying Wrath of Jobs. Unfortunately for them, we're reasonably certain that Steve's powers transcend time, space, and dimension, and once he's got their real names, the poor lil' leakers are pretty much doomed.

So what about that whole First Amendment thing? Well, California's "shield" laws do allow journalists to publish trade secrets provided that doing so can be shown to be in the public interest-- in other words, a journalist can publish trade secrets revealing that, say, a car manufacturer knowingly sells unsafe vehicles, or that a chemical plant is secretly dumping toxic waste in school playgrounds. But as Judge Kleinberg puts it, "an interested public is not the same as the public interest," and details of the as-yet-unannounced Asteroid product, while juicy, just don't live up to that standard. He also notes that debate over whether or not Apple rumors sites qualify as journalists is moot, since "laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too." (Yes, we know that some people are arguing that prerelease product specs and pricing don't constitute a trade secret, but a little research would seem to indicate otherwise.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will, of course, appeal the ruling, which (despite prolonging the knife-fight) we consider to be a good thing; sure, we happen to agree with the judge's ruling as applied to the state laws on the books, but the issue of free speech is so fundamental that these laws themselves should obviously come under scrutiny once in a while. Specifically, the EFF insists that the California laws are at odds with federal statutes that "stop net firms handing over copies of email messages if the owner of that account does not give their consent," and while that's all being hashed out, the Asteroid-leaking Worker Bees have a little more time to figure out how to relocate to an alternative Steveless reality in hopes of escaping their doom. It's futile, of course, but hey-- it beats workin'.

We know we're wicked late to the party on this one, but we really just need to take a moment to address this whole Super Shuffle thing. As you all know, Apple's distinctive and eye-catching industrial designs apparently give off copycat pheromones or something, because swarms of lookalike products pop up whenever the company has a nice-looking hit on its hands. Usually the knockoffs are at least a hair or two short of being overt duplicates, simply seeking to capitalize on some aspect of Apple's general design without cloning it outright; remember the influx of brightly-colored translucent plastic after the iMac made a splash? Or the increased in silvery and vaguely cubic PCs after the Power Mac G4 Cube touched down? Or how several MP3 players suddenly turned iPod-white-- until the iPod mini came out, at which point they went metallic and multihued?

Sometimes, though, the knockoffs get really, really close to the line. Take, for example, the E-Power, Future Power's attempt to out-iMac the iMac despite the presence of a floppy drive and one seriously ugly operating system. Or to get more recent, consider the fake iPod mini (as covered by Engadget) that faithful viewer scubus tipped us off to a couple of weeks back: the only differences are that 1) its screen has a goofy heart border; 2) it's not an MP3 player, but an FM radio; and 3) based on photos of the thing's construction, the word "craptacular" springs immediately to mind.

But even those didn't go so far as LUXPRO did with its Super Shuffle. The site's graphics seem to be intermittently unavailable (perhaps intentionally, to avoid a dead-of-night visit by a team of black-ops server ninjas dispatched from Cupertino?), but Engadget still has plenty of incriminating images accompanying its own coverage of the most blatant design ripoff in the history of this or any other universe. Take an iPod shuffle, make it a millimeter thicker, add a second slider to the back, stamp the words "SUPER SHUFFLE" on the case in a nondescript font and all caps, and blammo-- that's the Super shuffle design for you. (The extra thickness and slider are presumably to accommodate the voice recorder and FM tuner functions that LUXPRO threw in-- sure must be fun operating those features without a screen...)

Reportedly, Apple is not amused; according to an afterdawn.com article pointed out by faithful viewer obfuscatedcode, Apple reps at CeBIT (where the Super shuffle was unveiled) actually asked LUXPRO to remove the product from its display case on the show floor, and LUXPRO apparently complied once Apple's lawyers got involved-- but the Super shuffle was right back on display the very next day, alongside its marketing materials that also "looked a lot like those used by Apple."

So whaddaya think: is LUXPRO just counting on selling a ton of these things long before a judge can tell it to stop? Or was it never really planning on going into full production in the first place, and only made the prototypes to generate media buzz and draw traffic to its other products? Because the third option-- that LUXPRO really thought it could get away with this without ever being slapped with a trade dress lawsuit-- seems inconceivable if the company is run by people capable of putting on their own pants and maybe eating a fried egg without getting more than a teaspoonful of yolk in their hair.