Apple may be getting up there in years, but it still hasn't lost all of its sense of humor-- not, at least, if its April Fool's Day antics are any indication. You may have noticed over the years that AtAT generally refrains from the deluge of fake news stories that flood the Mac-centric web every April 1st, in part because we're too tired from making stuff up those other 364 days of the year. Instead, we like to sit back, relax, and see what everyone else comes up with... all the while watching our inbox fill to bursting with mail from alarmed viewers who forgot to look at the calendar before firing up their browsers. (This year's best, at least from a sheer "pipe dream" perspective, is Visor Central's NewtonX Springboard module, which allegedly runs a variant of Mac OS X on the Handspring Visor. The Apple PDA rumor lives!)

Anyway, Apple's contribution to the chaos was reportedly to run a fake ad-- at least in Australia, according to the MacEvangeList, and possibly in the U.S. as well (though we doubt it). When last we checked, the EvangeList still had the ad posted to its web page, which happily introduces "the new beige iMac." Underneath, in the copyright fine print, you can read that "Apple Computer Australia Pty Ltd reserves the right to advertise silly products that don't exist on this date." Good one. Of course, we haven't seen the ad anywhere except for at the MacEvangeList site, so it's entirely possible that the ad is actually the list's prank, not Apple's-- but we doubt that, since we imagine Apple would have smacked them down something fierce by now for beigeifying the Apple logo without permission.

The sad thing is, we can imagine a certain subspecies of the IT world positively drooling over the prospect of an honest-to-goodness beige iMac. Such a product would obviate any need to continue ridiculing the iMac as a "toy" in order to downplay the fact that inside that garish, unbusinesslike exterior beats the heart of a reliable, inexpensive, and zippy little system that's ideal for a variety of corporate desk-jockey tasks. It's always been the iMac's color scheme that's barred the iMac from the corporate ecosystem, since even Graphite is way too flashy for that mindset. But beige? Lose the translucency in Apple's fake ad, and it'd be perfect for the business world.

Oh, and can it be bundled with Virtual PC so it runs DOS in full-screen mode? That'd really get IT directors opening their wallets...