All right, 'fess up-- which one of you stole the iBook? According to Mac OS Rumors, some shameless and daring individual managed to "liberate" one of the 200 pre-production iBooks from the Apple booth at last week's Expo. If the report is true, then it was a pretty impressive-- if despicable-- feat; the fifty iBooks scattered throughout the crowd at the keynote address to demonstrate AirPort wireless networking were physically tethered to the Apple representatives who wielded them. And while the ones displayed at Apple's booth were only chained to the countertops with a thin, easily-cuttable wire, the throngs of rabid iBook enthusiasts crowding around every unit should have made theft a downright impossibility. (Then again, we know a gentleman who once stole a watermelon from the local supermarket on a dare by simply shoving the thing under his sweater and walking out as if nothing was out of the ordinary. It's amazing what the "right" attitude can accomplish.)

Now, we have to say, this kind of wacky, consequences-be-damned, temporary-insanity-driven heist has AtAT-Fan fingerprints all over it. So if the perpetrator is out there in our faithful viewing audience, we'd just like to say, we're here for you, buddy. We know that you were just swept up in the moment; the Apple rep turned his back to address somebody's questions about why the iBook is so freakin' heavy, and that little devil appeared on your left shoulder whispering that it wasn't too heavy to shove into your big yellow Iomega shopping bag and walk away with no one the wiser. (The little angel appeared on your right shoulder, too, but it was too busy drooling over the iBook's Blueberry curves to tell you to do the right thing.) So you walked off with an iBook prototype-- everyone makes mistakes. And we don't see why you should have to spend the rest of your life in a virtual hell of guilt and self-loathing just because you had a momentary lapse of judgment. Heck, anyone could've made the same mistake. Those iBooks were downright irresistible.

So we want to help, we really do. Here's the deal: contact us at our studios, and we'll arrange for you to ship the purloined portable to us. We, of course, will turn right around and ship the unit back to Apple's labs, where it belongs. Don't worry, we'll scrub your fingerprints off of it first, and we'll keep your identity confidential; we're sure Apple will just be happy to get it back. That is, if it doesn't get mysteriously lost in the mail on the way back to Cupertino... Stuff like that has been known to happen on occasion. Right?