Is it just us, or is Apple Recon getting even more sarcastic than usual lately? Yes, their tone has always been somewhat adversarial in nature, and tends to hang out in "We Know More Than You Do" land-- that's part of their charm, after all. But recently it seems like they're starting to get downright nasty at times. There was that whole flap about the "Chameleon iMacs," for instance, but what got us thinking about this now was their latest installment about the "Millennium Special" WebMate. First, the background: if you haven't been keeping up with the whispers in the rumors circles, recently there's been some talk that Apple plans to release a version of its upcoming "WebMate" consumer portable computer that includes a special "wind-up" power source. The idea is that if your WebMate is low on battery power and you're not near a standard outlet, you can just crank some juice into the batteries by using old-fashioned elbow grease.

Don't laugh; the wind-up power source they're talking about exists, and it's used in radios and other electrical equipment for use in countries without ubiquitous power grids. The thing is, we read about this technology a couple of years ago, when it was rumored to be included "soon" in a version of the ill-fated eMate. In an eMate, a wind-up power source makes a fair amount of sense; since it was basically a Newton MessagePad with a keyboard, there was no big color screen or spinning hard disk to suck down a ton of power. Plus, it's kind of a neat gimmick to throw into a portable designed for grade-school kids who can crank up the juice on the bus during the field trip tot he museum. A WebMate, though, is expected to be a full-fledged laptop computer, and it's going to need a lot more power than a hand crank will provide-- unless you can type one-handed while cranking at 70 RPM with the other. We strongly suspect that rumors of the wind-up generator's inclusion in the WebMate was just a mutation of the old eMate stories.

Regardless, Recon pounced on the rumor and blew it up into a full-fledged masterpiece of sarcasm. In their world, Apple's preparing to market the hand-cranked WebMates as a "Millennium Special," built to provide "wireless Internet" after the Y2K bug causes widespread power outages. They go and on about hand-cranking to watch streaming QuickTime footage of widespread panic in the streets, and the optional $399.95 Exercise Cycle package which lets you keep your WebMate powered while you exercise, "since you won't be able to get to your health club because the world is going to hell in a handbasket all around you!" Top it all off with their report that the official product name of this wind-up wonder will be the "Model T," and, well, you get the picture. So, uh, Recon-- how do you really feel about the wind-up WebMate rumors? But then again, if goofy rumors about color-changing iMacs and hand-cranked WebMates are a crucial part of the whole online Macintosh experience (and we think they are), Recon's "knowier-than-thou" attitude is just as integral. We're all just one big happy family, after all.