Oh boy, here we go... For those of you who are starving for controversy in the Apple world of late, a big ol' hornet's nest has been kicked hard and a nasty rumor from a couple of months ago has resurfaced with a vengeance. We imagine some of you aren't entirely comfortable with this New Apple, who seems far less likely to inspire righteous indignation than in the olden days. So if you're nostalgic for those exciting times of rampant ambivalence when you could love the Mac but hate Apple (Clone Wars, anyone?), you will definitely want to get on board what we're calling the Blue Blocker scandal.

Basically, here's the skinny: a rumor arose a while back that Apple's firmware update for the blue and white G3, once installed, actually rendered the box incapable of booting if a G4 upgrade was installed. Non-firmware-upgraded blue and white systems, as well as all beige G3s, handled the G4 upgrades just fine. This has since been established as fact, but what hasn't been proven is whether or not Apple crippled the systems on purpose in order to prompt people to buy new G4 systems instead of getting third-party G4 upgrades for their G3s. If they did, then of course this is a move that rates higher on the sliminess scale than a lot of what Reigning Slime King™ Microsoft has been pulling for a number of years.

We try to keep an open mind about this, thinking that it's entirely possible that the firmware update accidentally broke the G3's upgradeability; we've heard at least once that Mac OS 9 fixes whatever got broken, though that's unconfirmed. But we considered it pretty ominous when, right in the middle of reading a thread on Apple's discussion board about this issue, suddenly all the notes got deleted. Apple's official stance on the issue is that "there is no shipping or announced PowerPC processor upgrade from Apple... and we're not aware of any documentation that indicates any Power Macintosh G3 computer was marketed as being upgradeable to a PowerPC G4 processor."

While that may sound a bit scary, it's important to keep in mind that Apple lost a lawsuit recently regarding its prior marketing of a Mac as being processor-upgradeable, so they've been very careful not to make that claim ever since. We at AtAT see a few possible outcomes to this brouhaha. First, it may turn out that Mac OS 9 does in fact fix whatever Apple broke (accidentally or intentionally) and so G4 upgrades may work just fine come October-- and the upgrades probably won't be available until then anyway. Another possibility, increasingly likely given the uproar, is that Apple will issue a new firmware update that also fixes the problem-- once they sell a few thousand G4 systems. Lastly, the upgrade companies could find their own way around the Blue Blocker; XLR8 claims they already have. Regardless, until Apple says something about this, the fans are going to get mighty mean. You can get up to speed on the whole thing at MacInTouch's special report.