We're sure there are very few things that Steve Jobs values more highly than Apple's crack legal team, but corporate secrecy must be near the top of that short, short list. The reports of Steve's twisted and awful rage inflicted upon the hapless goofs at ATI for wrecking his Expo surprise are now legendary, and the subsequent resignation of ATI CFO James Chwartacky (as originally reported by faithful viewer Mike) seems like an awfully big coincidence to swallow. So, given that leaks about unannounced Apple products would appear to be Steve's single biggest rage trigger in life, we can only imagine his conflict and inner turmoil over Apple's new lawsuit intended to make an example of a leaker by stringing him up and eviscerating him-- er, litigationally speaking. On the one hand, Steve must love the idea of an NDA-violating little mole getting nailed to the proverbial wall-- but on the other, the lawsuit itself is now providing hints about the next cool stuff to issue forth from Apple's labs. (Put on your irony hats.)

See, according to a CNET article, the lawsuit (which is presumably a matter of public record) alleges that the mysterious "Worker Bee" posted information about three unreleased Apple products over the course of the past several months: the new Pro Mouse, the dual-processor Power Mac G4s, and-- this is the kicker, here-- "an as-yet unreleased Apple product." Well, of course that last part immediately had dozens of rumor hounds scouring the AppleInsider message boards, looking for anything and everything "Worker Bee" had posted on July 25th-- since Apple Legal was even kind enough to provide the date of the posting in question. Guess what? On that date, "Worker Bee" had posted "detailed specifications" of an upcoming iBook, which supposedly sports "up to 466 MHz, DVD, 1 FireWire port, [and] 8 MB of VRAM." Furthermore, he indicated that the "screen size will remain the same," while he "[didn't] know about new colors... yet."

Whoops! While that information might well have been lost in the swirling miasma of unsubstantiated rumors had it just been left alone, Apple's own lawsuit has now pretty much confirmed it as signal instead of noise. Which means that Steve is probably grinding his teeth down to stumps as he tries to resolve his emotional conflict: his legal team is trying to put an end to leaks once and for all, and for that its members should be treated to a round of fruit smoothies and maybe a few thousand stock options. But at the same time, they've gone and done just what Steve hates the most: they have, for all intents and purposes, told the world about an unreleased product. So after that round of fruit smoothies, by all rights, Steve should tear their throats out with a letter opener, thus sending those stock options on to the lawyers' next of kin.

Here's hoping it all ends happily for everyone concerned. After all, Apple Legal's sin wasn't particularly heinous-- but then again, from a detail standpoint, ATI's was arguably far less so, and those guys got slammed pretty hard. In any case, we all now have a pretty good idea of what Apple planned to unveil at next month's Apple Expo in Paris-- since the initiative to make that show into the European equivalent of a U.S. Macworld Expo requires that Steve roll out some new gear. Of course, now that the cat's out of the bag, we have to wonder if Steve will switch to a different surprise, instead...