Apple-- and especially Steve-- obviously likes surprises, right? There's that "a surprise every ninety days" directive, there's Steve's legendary "oh, and one more thing..." move at his keynote addresses, there's the fact that Apple product development is so deeply shrouded in mystery that many Apple engineers enter the testing labs and are strangely never heard from again... But what that really means is that Apple likes to give surprises; when the company's on the receiving end, it's not always the most gracious recipient. Steve just hates to be robbed of seeing the shock and delight on his followers' faces when he breaks open the new gear; hence, the leaked MacCube rumors led directly to the Great Apple Lawyer Stampede of 2000.

So let's say you're a graphics circuitry manufacturer, and several years ago you landed one sweet OEM deal: Apple Computer is using your chips in its entire product line. And over the years, for whatever reason, Apple has stuck by you, even though other companies are producing chips that might be far better suited to the Mac-using community. Now let's say that recently you've fallen on some rough times, financially speaking, and to make matters worse, those other graphics companies have finally woken up to the viability of the Mac market and are starting to court Apple's OEM attention-- with products that may or may not make your own technology look like a Lite Brite with half the pegs missing. Would this be a good time to risk Steve's wrath by spilling the beans on new Apple products, just days before Steve's planning to unveil them himself?

Probably not, but strangely enough, that's just what ATI seems to have done. According to a report at MacCentral, the company actually issued a press release saying that it "plans a surprise announcement" on Wednesday-- and then "offered details about those plans." Okay, now apart from the sheer surreality of both announcing your upcoming "surprise announcement" and then telling people what that surprise will be, we can't help but wonder whether ATI's thought this one through. Because those details that ATI just shouted from the rooftops include the fact that "on Wednesday, Apple will introduce three new systems with ATI graphic hardware on board." Suppose Steve's looking a little, uh, miffed right about now?

It gets better: if it wasn't enough that ATI spilled the beans about Apple unveiling new Macs, the company dug its grave a little deeper and announced that one of those systems would be "a new iMac with ATI's RAGE 4XL chip," and that the other two will be "Power Mac systems which will ship with RAGE 128 Pro and Radeon processors." So apparently Steve's going to give us an iMac and a couple of G4s on Wednesday. Not that the news comes as a great shock or anything, but it's still info about unannounced Apple products publicly revealed by a business partner. Or would that be "soon-to-be-former business partner"? Right about now we figure Apple's asking NVIDIA if it's any better at keeping its mouth shut...