It refuses to die, and frankly, we should have seen it coming. Anyone who lived through the COS fracas of 1997 should have recognized all the earmarks of a Hoax With Legs. You may recall that the COS scam-- the alleged $99 "alternative Mac OS" that claimed full compatibility with existing applications, quadruple the speed of Apple's operating system, full memory protection, multiprocessor support, and a raft of other features, all crammed into 12 MB on disk and a 4 MB RAM partition-- persisted beyond all reasonable lengths of time for one reason and one reason alone: it exploited the platform's need for a modern Mac OS back when Rhapsody (er, we mean Mac OS X) was still years away. And with the Xtrem Mac story now being covered by news organizations as disparate as WIRED, ZDNet, and TechWeb, it's plain to see that in 2000 the way to make a Mac hoax last is to tap into the latest fear plaguing the community: stagnant chip speeds. The G4 is still stuck at 500 MHz, and faster versions may be more than six months away-- and still probably won't top 900 MHz even then. So, announce you've got a 1.2 GHz Mac (coincidentally just a hair speedier than the fastest chip Intel's managed to crank out so far), and the suckers come a-runnin'.

Adding fuel to the fire is Xtrem's web site-- too professional-looking for your average hoax-- and the latest kicker: an honest-to-gosh press release sent out over PR Newswire. That's not exactly cheap-- and most purveyors of "joke"-style hoaxes aren't generally willing to invest actual cash to keep the gag rolling. Clearly, the folks at Xtrem have something financial to gain by propagating the myth of the 1200 MHz G4. Are they simply harvesting the email addresses of interested parties signing up for more info? Maybe, privacy policy or no privacy policy. But more likely, they're masters of misdirection who are using the media typhoon attracted by the 1200 MHz G4 as free publicity for their other product-- the $80 MacThrust, which claims to deliver instant speed boosts to existing Macs by running the G3 or G4 processor at a higher clock speed.

While there's no info on the MacThrust at the Xtrem web site other than the sparse marketing blurb contained in the press release itself, clip-on overclocking mechanisms have been around for years-- they even used to be widely available in the Mac mail-order catalogs for 680x0- and 601-based Macs. So what if this Swedish company took a standard, widely-used technology, built a product out of it, targeted it at the Mac market, and then concocted a second fictional product intended solely to grab people's attention? We have two words for you: bait and switch. (Okay, that's three words. Shut up.)

So far, that's the explanation that makes the most sense to us. If there's anyone out there who seriously believes that Xtrem has super-cooled a standard G4 to run at 1200 MHz, we've got a few copies of COS to sell you. Meet us on the Brooklyn Bridge-- we'll throw that into the bargain, too. A clip-on overclocker for existing Macs is one thing; that's well within the realm of the doable. But no one's going to convince us for a second that the 1.2 GHz PowerPC 7400 is anything but an attention-getting scam until the thing actually ships. As for the MacThrust, if it's a real product (it's already missed the "late July" ship date listed in the press release), we'd still be a little paranoid about using it. Personally, we wouldn't buy a dog biscuit from people making the claims Xtrem is making, let alone something they expect us to attach to the processors in our Macs to push them faster than they've been designed to run. What are we, the Gullible Risk Duo? We'll let the others go first, thanks very much.

Besides, MacThrust aside, we've already gone on the record with our staunch belief that the Xtrem Mac is nothing but a hoax, and we don't plan to backpedal. We will continue to consider the Xtrem Mac a hoax until the company proves otherwise. Heck, we'll probably stick firm on the hoax theory even if Xtrem does ship a 1.2 GHz Mac later this year-- though at that point we'd admit that the company was certainly willing to go to great lengths to perpetuate the scam, what with actually building working systems and shipping them and all. Now that's commitment!