Glory be, John Dvorak was right! While he never said so in so many words (well, okay, make that "so few words"), it was clear that he felt that any high-tech contraption so gosh-darned girly could only be the work of the devil himself. Now, while we never figured Apple industrial design guru Jonathan Ives for the diabolical type, it's no secret that the man pulling all the strings throughout the iBook's development was Steve Jobs. And do we really need to draw comparisons between Steve and the Prince of Darkness? We thought not.

C'mon, the iBook has the devil's fingerprints all over it. First it debuted incredibly late-- it missed a huge chunk of the crucial back-to-school buying season. And supply was very constrained for several months. Why? Because of the Taiwanese earthquake, which several people took to be a sign of the coming apocalypse. Doesn't that just make you go "hmmmmmm"? Then there was that mildly annoying tendency of the iBook to scramble all the data on its hard drive; if irretrievable data loss isn't diabolical, we don't know what is. Except, perhaps, for the way that Apple covered up the problem for months, and still doesn't post a huge flashing warning on its iBook Support Page cautioning users to turn off the "Preserve contents of memory" option in the Energy Saver control panel. Why, we're amazed that we never saw it before; it's only a matter of time before the weld lines in our Blueberry iBook start spelling out "Red Rum" and blood oozes from the speaker.

Okay, we can sense that you're still not convinced. Incurable skeptics, one and all... Well, here's the clincher: Go2Mac reports that a Japanese site called Tak.'s Mystic Room describes a process by which an iBook's clock speed can be increased-- an arcane and mystical practice known as "overclocking." By dancing naked around an inverted cross, sacrificing a small animal or two, and adjusting a couple of resistors (an occult ritual known as "The Voiding of The Warranty"), the iBook's G3 can be raised past its current speed of 300 MHz. How high can it go? Why, to a theoretical maximum of 666 MHz, of course. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!!