The Wrath of Steve is both legendary and terrible in its fierceness, but has it been blown way out of proportion? In particular, unsubstantiated reports filtering into the AtAT Mobile Production Unit (currently chasing storms in the lush, rolling hills and valleys of Urbana, Illinois) indicates that the most infamous recent example of Steve's awful vengeance-- the ATI Incident-- may have been all smoke, no fire. These days parents frighten their young children with tales of Steve's retaliation after ATI's little "indiscretion": the way he ripped the Radeon demo right out of the middle of his keynote agenda at the last minute, the frenzied mandate that all Radeons be pulled from every Expo Mac just before showtime, etc. "To this day," the story goes, "a visit to the Apple Store reveals that ATI's Radeon is nowhere to be seen!" (Cue thunder crash, howling creature of the night.) We think there's also a bit about a bloody hook hanging from the car door, but we're not too sure about the details.

Anyway, the question that's been raised by the aforementioned unsubstantiated reports is this: did Steve pull all references to the Radeon because he was angry with ATI, or was he angry with ATI because he had to pull the Radeons? Rumor has it that the Cube production really came right down to the wire, and the Radeons had only been tested for a few hours just before Steve was ready to take the stage. It was at that point that someone discovered a show-stopper bug-- a hardware error in the Radeon that couldn't possibly be fixed in time for the keynote. While Apple engineers were hard at work trying to find a workaround right up to curtain time, the glitch proved not to fixable, and so the Radeon was history before it even hit the present. So yeah, Steve was none too pleased, but if this story is true, then the decision to remove the Radeons was an engineering one, not motivated by malicious revenge. Much.

Given ATI's none-too-spotless track record with shipping not-ready-for-prime-time gear (witness the crash-prone blue and white G3s, whose Rage 128 cards had drivers suitable only for use in concrete radiation-proof bunkers), we find the above scenario eminently believable. Then again, it's not hard to imagine Steve carrying a grudge too far, either, so it's just a matter of which story you'd rather believe. That said, we often think that the Mercurial Mr. Jobs may be associated with lots more "erratic" behavior than perhaps is strictly accurate. Reputations can be such awful things, can't they? We bet Vlad the Impaler wasn't that bad a guy, either, if one met him socially. He probably would have been a pretty good bowler. (Insert crack about human heads here.)

Incidentally, the bottom line for ATI is pretty much the same either way; either they're on Steve's bad side for leaking the new Mac info too early, or they're in the doghouse for continued spotty Mac development efforts. Take your pick. Either way, we wouldn't be surprised if next year's Macs start sporting graphics hardware made by another vendor.