By now most of AtAT's faithful viewers are aware of the running gag known as "Apple products in CompUSA's Sunday circulars." It's harder to find Mac hardware in one of those than it is to find an actual peanut in a modern box of Cracker Jacks. But even wrong information is better than no info at all, as faithful viewer Kareem Kazkaz makes clear. He pointed out an "interesting" description of the iMac at CompUSA's web site. The description has since been amended to list the standard specs we all know and love, but before it was changed apparently the particular iMac model described was listed as having a 350 MHz Pentium II processor. Holy hybrid, Batman!

Ah, but you probably thought the Pentium-powered iMac was just a humorous mistake, didn't you? Or did all those little alarm bells go off in your head warning you that there's more here than meets the eye? It's no secret that rumors about Motorola possibly cancelling further PowerPC development has some Apple watchers nervously waiting for the other shoe to drop, and while Motorola execs strongly deny that any such move is in the works, you should know by now never to take an exec's statement too seriously. Yes, it's a long shot, but if Motorola were to drop the PPC, that would leave IBM as the sole developer and supplier of every chip at the heart of every Apple product. A sketchy situation, at best; what if IBM were to duck out, too?

Nope, that Pentium-fueled iMac is the real deal, cooked up in Apple's secret underground labs as a "Plan B" in case the PowerPC goes kaput. It runs a souped-up version of the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" operating system, which appears to be Mac OS 8.5 rehosted on the x86 architecture. However, this "alternative" iMac was supposed to be kept under wraps, only to be unveiled if circumstances demanded it. Instead, somebody mixed up the work orders, and somehow specs for the secret iMac design (see, the "i" really stands for "iNtel") found their way into CompUSA's marketing department. Whoopsie! But black-suited Apple agents have "remedied" the problem, paying a little visit to CompUSA headquarters and "persuading" them to remove the Pentium II specs. Reports are filtering in that the two agents in question looked remarkably like Jesse "The Body" Ventura and game show host Alex Trebek, but hey, you can't believe everything you hear.