If you ask us, all the speculation about a hand-cranked portable Mac has officially gotten way out of hand. Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you know what we're talking about; a couple of years ago, some ingenious fellow concocted a relatively small hand-powered generator that was capable of providing juice for various electrical devices. This generator would let people run radios and other gadgets in areas without widespread access to electrical outlets, and without Quickie Marts on every corner where they could otherwise buy disposable batteries for eight bucks apiece. Now, a long time ago, when this hand-wound generator was getting lots of news coverage for its potential benefits to third-world countries, it was even shown powering an Apple eMate-- a CNN article on the technology even has QuickTime footage of this, if you're skeptical. It was reported that Apple was involved in negotiations to license the hand-crank technology and include it in a version of the eMate. Of course, when the whole Newton project got blown to smithereens, the eMate died a horrible death and that was that. Or so we would have thought.

Recently, though, the hand-cranked portable rumors have sprung up again, this time focusing on the upcoming consumer portable, code-named "P1" and expected to sell under the names "WebMate" and "MacMate." While everyone loves the idea of a laptop that you can wind up when you need some extra juice, frankly, the whole rumor seemed just a little too goofy to be true, even though we're talking about Apple. For one thing, as many people pointed out, the wind-up power supply that's used in those famous radios is too large and heavy to include in a laptop computer that's supposed to be roughly the dimensions and weight of a PowerBook 2400. For another, it just smacks of deliberate misinformation leaked by Apple in an attempt to discover the holes in its Wall of Secrecy™. For a third, it just sounds, well, goofy. So imagine our utter surprise when Apple Recon received a letter from Fred Johnson of the Apple Marketing Group, all but confirming that Apple is indeed working on putting wind-up power in the MacMate (which will be targeted at the educational market), though Steve Jobs is reportedly "still debating" whether that feature should also be included in the consumer-targeted WebMate.

So there it is-- it sounds like we may just see a hand-cranked P1 after all. Unless, of course, that email from Fred Johnson didn't come from Fred at all, but from somebody yanking Recon's chain... Recon didn't post the full mail headers, so we can't see for ourselves, but we admit we're suspicious. After all, has Apple ever commented publicly on any feature of the P1? If the P1 were really to include such an innovative feature as wind-up power, wouldn't that feature either go into an official press release or be guarded as a Level 6 Secret? If you ask us, something's a little fishy, here, but Recon's been around for a long time; they wouldn't be taken in by something as basic as faked email-- would they?

Addendum: Thanks to the many viewers who pointed out that Recon was indeed yanking our chains. The alleged email from Fred Johnson was dated February 29th, 1999 (we only checked to make sure it wasn't April 1st) and Recon admits the email was false in their "explanation page." Interestingly enough, Recon didn't make up the message-- someone really did try to fake them out with false email from "Fred Johnson;" they were sharp enough to catch it, as we would have expected. They just decided to post it anyway to see how many people would fall for it-- like we mostly did. ;-) (The previous three paragraphs are unchanged from our initial broadcast, to stand as a historical record.)