The fun never stops with the Fun Factory™. It's only been a few weeks since a brash young upstart called Future Power unveiled their latest innovation: an all-in-one Wintel box called the "E-Power" that, shall we say, "somewhat resembles" Apple's own iMac. And if you replace the phrase "somewhat resembles" with the phrase "looks exactly freakin' like" and tack an "except a buttload uglier" onto the end, you probably have a clearer picture. If you're really a glutton for righteous indignation and the perversion of a great design into a cheap and ill-conceived shadow of its former self, well, you can always check out Apple Insider's extensive E-Power photo collection. Even more unbelievable is the sheer unmitigated gall of Future Power to claim that they did not steal the iMac's design when they fashioned their system, but came up with the whole thing on their own. Heck, if Apple hadn't have sued these guys, we'd probably have had to launch a special AtAT black ops task force to go smack 'em around a little. Sheesh.

Anyway, so even as Apple's lawsuit is pending, would you doubt for a minute that another Wintel cloner would leap into the fray with yet another iMac rip-off? This one's not quite as blatant as the E-Power, but if you think it's not a designer knock-off, you're kidding yourselves. The Sotec e-one is being sold in Japan at roughly the iMac's price point, and a single glance should be enough for anyone to guess what machine it's trying to evoke. But what intrigues us most is the way that Mac fans seem far less outraged by Sotec's attempt than by Future Power's; the Mac Observer write-up is downright kind, calling it "less of a rip-off" and a system that "does not go so far to plagiarize Apple's design concepts." That's faint praise indeed, since the only way to create more of a rip-off than the E-Power would be for some manufacturer to break into an LG manufacturing plant, steal a slew of iMac cases, and throw some PC guts in them...

But while we only have the one photo to go by, from what we can tell, the Mac Observer's right-- this ain't no iMac. Sure, it has the same translucent plastics and the same blue-and-white two-tone color scheme as the iMac, and it comes with a translucent blue-and-white keyboard and mouse, and it features the familiar all-in-one design complete with the front-mounted speakers and the blue-button-in-the-center CD-ROM drive, etc. But look at the different (oops, we mean "innovative") placement of the colors themselves! That's not the same as the iMac. And the truncated case with the handle sticking up all funny? That's definitely not an iMac; actually, it kind of looks to us like an iMac that was hatched before it was finished developing. But consider this: if Future Power had never shown the E-Power first, wouldn't you be a lot more incensed about the e-one (yes, even the name is innovative!)'s release?