Imagine how cool this would be: you wake up after a restful night at a snazzy hotel, you go downstairs for breakfast, and your waiter brings you an iBook with your morning coffee. This iBook just happens to be tricked out with an AirPort card and Internet access, so you can surf your favorite sites and check your email while stuffing your face. Surfing and stuffing-- what better way to start the day? And the best news of all is that this is no glorious vision of a distant Utopian future; you can do this right now. It's not even that expensive... rooms start at a mere $47 a night, and the iBook-at-breakfast service is absolutely free.

There is, however, one little catch: you have to go to Malaysia to take advantage of this dream come true. According to MacCentral, the hotel that's pampering its guests with complementary iBook time during breakfast is the Hotel Equatorial in Kuala Lumpur. Now, some of you out there may be a mere hop, skip, and a jump away from that fine city (last month's ratings data indicate that twenty-four of you are in Malaysia-- howdy, folks!), but for the AtAT staff here in Boston, the first coach flight we found would put a four-thousand-dollar-sized dent in our wallets. Each. Kinda puts that $47-a-night hotel fare in perspective, doesn't it? For the price of those airline tickets, we could each buy our own high-end PowerBook to drop crumbs in during breakfast. Or a couple of iBooks apiece, so there's a spare when one gets all sticky.

Speaking of crumbs and stickiness, we're impressed that the Hotel Equatorial has apparently somehow solved the problem of keeping its iBooks clean. One would think that after a few weeks of use at the breakfast table (by patrons who don't even own the equipment, and who are thus less likely to take particularly good care of it), each iBook would be rendered virtually unusable after coming into contact with various and sundry foodstuffs. Orange juice in the keyboard, jelly all over the screen, cream cheese clogging the speaker-- it could be a real mess. Furthermore, the iBook is not dishwasher-safe-- not even on the top rack. Trust us. (Don't ask.)

So, one would hope that the Hotel Equatorial will share its secret with the world, so that we won't have to drop four large just to stay at a hotel that'll loan us an iBook during breakfast. If the idea catches on, then someday iBook service at breakfast might become as ubiquitous as the copy of USA Today outside each door in the morning. Why, we foresee a day when even the Motel 6 in scenic Piscataway, New Jersey will provide AirPort-equipped iBooks during its complimentary continental breakfast service. But then again, we're not exactly Nostradamus, here.