Remember how a television commission in the United Kingdom recently banned Apple's Power Mac G5 commercial for making allegedly unproven and unprovable claims that the G5 is the "world's fastest, most powerful personal computer"? Remember how we noted that it might have been unwise of the UK to go poking at Apple's squishy bits like that, considering that the company has only just gotten over what we have to assume was a years-long grudge against Great Britain, what with all the Expo no-shows and software cancellations and layoffs and whatnot? Banning Apple's only G5 TV spot seemed likely to start the petty feud anew, which certainly couldn't be good for anyone involved.

Well, it looks like someone finally alerted the shadowy secret consortium of puppetmasters pulling the strings in that little corner of the globe, because while as far as we know the ad is still verboten (though we hear that the top dogs at the Independent Television Commission have mysteriously all gone missing), we're seeing evidence of what appears to be a conciliatory gesture intended to mitigate the Wrath of Steve. It's a subtle one, too, taking the form of decidedly pro-Mac sentiments in an interesting article in The Times.

The premise goes like this: take a longtime Mac user and stick him in front of a state-of-the-art laptop running Microsoft's latest OS, Windows XP Media Center. Then take a self-professed Wintel nut who is "proud to say that [his] machine is always in pieces" and fling him headlong into the welcoming waters of Mac OS X. (Panther, natch.) It's sort of a Freaky Friday for the tech set-- only without the cherubic grins of a young Jodie Foster, the squeaky-clean aura of mid-'70s Disney, or much hope of an eventual remake starring Jamie Lee Curtis. Oh, and not on a Friday.

And the Oscar goes to... (these envelopes are always so hard to open)... Mac OS X! While the Mac user kicking XP's tires admits that "generally speaking, it works well," he also notes a "feeling that something nasty and utterly incomprehensible is lurking just below the surface" and by way of example offers the following message that appeared while installing some software: "A read-only file c: inetwh32.dll was found while attempting to copy files to the destination location." At the same time he's chock full of questions: "Why do the applications always quit when you close a window? Why can't the system display Japanese and Russian properly? Why do the bubble messages designed to help irritate me so much?" Of course, he answers his own questions when he concludes that while Windows is "designed by people who know a lot about computers," Macs are "designed by people who know a lot about people."

In contrast, what of the Wintel geek test-driving Mac OS X? This one quote pretty much says it all: "After only three hours of using Apple's latest operating system, 10.3, I started to wonder if I should have made the change years ago." If that's not high enough praise for you, he also describes the installation of the OS as "annoyingly easy," Internet setup as "a doddle," and networking it with his home Wintel "simple-- something that even my Windows laptop struggles with occasionally." Really, his only complaint is that there aren't enough games, but then that's valid and exactly the sort of criticism we'd expect from a guy who has enough free time on his hands to have his PC in pieces all the time, so, cool.

In short, that article was way too positive not to have been a plant by Top Secret UK Consortium operatives hoping to avoid another extended snit from Apple-- and that, too, is just fine by us, since we'll take good Apple press any way we can get it. Here's hoping that Steve accepts the peace offering and doesn't call in an air strike or something. Gee, perhaps the Consortium could see their way to getting Apple Records to back off, too...