By now, just about everybody seems to have settled down and accepted Apple's color choices for the new iBook. You'll recall, of course, that when Steve Jobs first announced that Apple's groundbreaking new consumer portable would only be available in Blueberry and Tangerine, a lot of people were puzzled-- and your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff was no exception. Blueberry we could understand, given that flavor's "most popular" status in the iMac world. But Tangerine was a puzzler; all sales data and all opinion polls showed clearly that, at least as far as iMacs go, Tangerine was the least popular flavor by far. So why would Apple pick the most popular and least popular, and ignore Lime, Strawberry, and Grape? That was the question that got kicked around a lot for a while, with plenty of guesses and conjecture being offered. Was Steve trying to make Tangerine more popular by making it one of the only two iBook flavors? Was Apple just trying to use up the rest of its Tangerine dye before retiring the unfortunate color forever?

Eventually, one explanation was generally accepted by most-- several Apple representatives reported that the company had tried all five flavors, but only Blueberry and Tangerine looked good in the rubber used in the iBook's rugged construction. We wouldn't be surprised if Apple's lab gnomes are working on different dye mixtures right now; iBooks in the other flavors might be introduced not long after the first units ship to store shelves. At least, that was our thinking until Sunday afternoon, when we had an epiphany while watching VH-1's "Before They Were Rock Stars." (Hey, we have most of our epiphanies while watching cheesy cable TV. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.)

See, there's this one Gap ad in such heavy rotation, it's pretty darn likely that you've seen it. It involves lots of vest-wearing models singing Madonna's "Dress You Up" as the camera pans past them, ending with the on-screen phrase, "Everyone In Vests." Personally, we're not at all sure about this whole "vests" thing, but we're not exactly fashion plates, so we'll defer to a higher fashion sense. Or at least a higher-paid fashion sense. But we digress-- the important thing about the commercial isn't the vests at all. Instead, we were struck by the colors used in the ad; there were twenty-four models shown in those thirty seconds, and every single one of them was dressed in Gap clothes that were some combination of grey, black, and-- yes, you guessed it-- orange. Orange is the only actual color shown, since, as Pee-Wee Herman points out, grey and black aren't colors. Just a coincidence? Hardly, my friends. Have you forgotten that Gap CEO Mickey Drexler joined Apple's board of directors not long ago? Just long enough, in fact, for one of two things to happen: either Mickey tipped off Steve that Tangerine was going to coordinate nicely with the Gap's fall colors, or Steve persuaded Mickey to push orange as the hip new color for schoolgoing teens this fall in hopes of making the Tangerine iBook a smash back-to-school hit. Either way, it's a fun little theory, isn't it?