Those of you who have been tuning in on a regular basis know that we, your friendly AtAT staff, are a highly principled team, with many deeply-held convictions. We believe that if everyone ate a healthy portion of Tater Tots every once in a while, there'd be no more wars. We believe that operating systems should suck as little as possible, maintaining a cool-to-lame ratio of at least 5:1. (Incidentally, every Microsoft operating system we've ever used scores so low, the values are best expressed in scientific notation.) We believe that Steve Jobs is an alien messenger sent from the stars, charged with the divine mission of injecting a little style into our otherwise beige little lives. But above all, we believe that Macs should light up when you use them.

We've been through all this before: the pre-release rumors about the iMacs lighting up, the original iMac mouse glowing until the feature was removed before shipment, the faint glow of the white Apple logo on the original PowerBook G3 Series, etc. But it wasn't until the "bronze" PowerBook G3 that we really got our wish-- the Apple logo on those suckers glows so brightly you could use it to signal planes in heavy fog. At that point we'd hoped that Apple had finally "seen the light" and accepted that light-up computers are the wave of the future. Of course, then we got the Power Mac G4 and the new "Kihei" iMac, neither of which glow at all. Fine, we thought-- Apple's just putting this cool feature into the portables. After all, we'd heard that while the Blueberry or Tangerine logo on the iBook's lid doesn't actually light up, it bears a cool glowing halo while the system's in use.

Of course, now that we actually own an iBook, we know just how dim that glow really is. Sure, in a dark room it's visible if you're looking for it, but it's nowhere near as impressive as the big, bright Apple beacon on the PowerBooks. Luckily, we stumbled across the secret to the iBook's hidden glow in MacNN's forums: put the Blueberry iBook under a black light. Reportedly, the handle "glows bright blue" under ultraviolet light. Sadly, not being hippies, we don't have immediate access to a black light to give this a shot-- but perhaps we can do what one of the posters did: take the iBook to a black-light-enabled strip club. ("Actually, miss, we're just here to see our laptop glow. Uhhh, I mean...") Hey, anything in the name of science.