Say what you will about the mercurial Mr. Jobs; for all the stories about him blowing his stack and tearing out some poor underling's throat with his teeth, eyewitness sightings of him losing his cool in public are relatively scarce. Of course there have been a couple of exceptions; the time he encountered a booth selling Apple logo merchandise on the Expo show floor, for instance, and loudly demanded that the "unauthorized" gear be surrendered immediately. (Turns out the company still held a valid license, signed by Gil Amelio-- so Gil got the last laugh after all.) We also recall a live CNBC interview from a few years back that ended abruptly when he actually got up and walked out, because the interviewer asked him whether he'd ever become Apple's permanent CEO and they had apparently agreed that they "weren't going to talk about this." But even in that situation, he calmly got up and left instead of pitching a public hissy fit and lunging for the interviewer's jugular. Hey, what can we say? The man's a pro.

So we couldn't help but wonder what his behind-closed-doors reaction had been to ATI's humongous indiscretion. You'll recall that the graphics manufacturer spilled the beans about Apple's new iMacs and Power Macs in a press release just a day or so before Steve's big keynote; at the time we opined that Steve might be "miffed" at having his big surprise ruined. More likely, he was downright homicidal, and we wouldn't be surprised to hear that a few junior interns who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time wound up in body bags faster than the Red Shirts on Star Trek.

Publicly, though, once he walked out on that stage, he didn't say anything bad about ATI. Unfortunately for the company, though, he didn't say anything good, either. In fact, he barely mentioned ATI at all, totally glossing over the graphics specs of the new hardware and conspicuously avoiding any and all mention of this new "Radeon" processor we were supposed to be so impressed with. Welcome to the icy world of Steve's ire, where the cold shoulder is the best you can hope for. Both AppleInsider and Inside Mac Games have immensely entertaining reports about ATI's huge gaffe and Steve's retaliation: in addition to scrubbing all references to the new Radeon from his keynote presentation (including a guest spot by an ATI executive who was supposed to demo the product), Iron Steve reportedly also demanded "all Radeons to be pulled from the show floor." Death by obscurity? You betcha.

So is this the end of ATI's long-standing and lucrative relationship with Apple? We wouldn't be at all surprised. The only problem is, NVIDIA may well be eager to grab Apple's OEM business, but any sort of transition on that scale is going to take time. Meanwhile, Apple's got all this new gear to ship, so some kind of truce with ATI is going to have to happen for business's sake. Suggestion to ATI: as an apology, send Steve a vegan Chocolate Ambrosia cake from Zenith on 8th Avenue. After sampling it on Thursday night, the AtAT staff is convinced that we'd forgive anything short of ethnic cleansing and forced Windows migration for a slice of that stuff.