Okay, people, it's time to stretch those memories, and stretch 'em hard. Travel with us, if you will, nearly two years in the past, back to that magical era known as "June, 1999." The original iMac had been publicly unveiled over a year earlier, the fruit-flavored iMacs had been shipping for several months, and a shameless young upstart known as Future Power led the charge into what would become a whole new PC-manufacturing cottage industry: counterfeiting the iMac's industrial design. After seeing the blatant iMac clone dubbed the "E-Power" (AppleInsider still has snapshots), Steve's legal eagles filed a lawsuit in record time, and by November, a federal judge had sided with Apple by slapping Future Power with an injunction keeping the E-Power off of store shelves.

Well, since then, not a whole lot has happened in the case, which inched along at the typical snail's pace of U.S. litigation. In December of '99 somebody hacked Future Power's web site to make the E-Power's description a little more, ahem, truthful-- and it took the company several days to notice. Eventually in March of last year, Apple settled similar trade dress lawsuits against iMac copycats Sotec, eMachines, and Daewoo, proclaiming itself victorious in its struggle to prevent others from sullying the iMac's reputation-- but Future Power was quick to remind everyone that its case was still pending, and that it intended to fight. Back in October of 2000, the company even unveiled its new take on the iMac theme: the 17-inch-display AIO, which had most Mac fans laughing and retching simultaneously.

Okay, enough backstory; welcome back to the present, where, as faithful viewer Leland Jory first noted, Future Power has just issued a press release announcing the conclusion of Apple's suit against it. Evidently Steve and company finally decided to settle, and the terms are as follows: Future Power agrees not to sell the original E-Power until at least February of 2004, but the AIO (with its 17-inch screen as a differentiating factor) may be sold freely as soon as Future Power can get it to market. In other words, Apple apparently has no problem with the sale of what is clearly an iMac ripoff, provided that it's a little bit bigger and a whole lot uglier. We imagine that since Apple's moving towards the silvery-white-clear look anyway, the "translucent colors" thing isn't so important anymore; sounds to us like still more evidence that Indigo's headed for the scrap-heap next month. In any case, you can expect to see the AIO strutting its lumpy translucent stuff wherever lamer PCs are sold.

What this also means, of course, is that Apple has effectively stomped the long-standing "17-inch iMac" rumor into a sticky paste; by allowing Future Power to sell its own 17-inch all-in-one translucent monstrosity sans legal hassles, Apple has virtually guaranteed that a similarly hulking iMac was never a part of Steve's plan (or, at least, isn't now). But old rumors die hard; for example, the Apple handheld theorists continue their conjecture, long after Phil Schiller himself publicly declared a year ago that Apple was working on no such thing. So we're willing to bet that the 17-inch iMac will be back in rumor form someday-- even if it's sporting a 17-inch LCD and a release date in 2003.