Wait, where are you going? Don't back away! Seriously, no speculation on upcoming Power Macs, we promise! But we have to mention that down here at the AtAT compound we all have a medical condition that requires a steady intake of tech-related gossip, so if we don't dish at least a little highly-suspect and uncorroborated dirt on some Mac product line, our skin may fall off again-- which is a royal pain, because it takes a team of medical specialists three or four hours to staple it all back on again. So for the sake of time and medical expenses, how about we just take a quick peek at an alleged eyewitness report on the long-awaited PowerBook G5? That ought to keep us in a continued state of dermal cohesion at least through the weekend.

So here's the latest we've come across on Apple's race to shoehorn a G5 into a portable that doesn't weigh twenty pounds and clock its battery life with a stopwatch: an anonymous tipster directed us to an article in Germany's MACup magazine, in which the author apparently claims to have seen an actual PowerBook G5 prototype-- or at least its motherboard. As usual, our German is sadly lacking (so he's outside sulking instead of in here translating for us), which means we rely once again on the ever-entertaining auto-translation wackiness courtesy of BabelFish. And from what we can make out, this guy claims to have been blessed with "a special favour"-- namely, a glimpse of "the completely new Main board Design of the G5-PowerBooks, which were to be introduced to hearing after at the beginning of April."

Reportedly this puppy will pack not one, but two 2.0 GHz G5 processors into a casing made of a "NASA developed carbon fiber-mix." There's a 1920x1280 17-inch display (capable of 30-bit color via a 256 MB graphics chip) and some kind of crazy water-cooling system to keep the whole thing from bursting into flame.

So. PowerBook G5s at the beginning of April? With dual processors? And an HD 17-inch screen in a carbon fiber enclosure? And a two-disk hardware RAID?! Okay, well, seeing as the beginning of April is kindasorta in the past, now, and these specs sound suspiciously like the drug-fueled raving fantasies of a Mac user who's about three and a half pecks short of a bushel upstairs, unfortunately we're going to have to chalk the whole thing up to an April Fool's gag (albeit a chronologically lax one-- the piece is dated "05.2004") that loses a little something in the translation; after all, the Germans have been in on the jokes from the very beginning. And if nothing else, the phrase "an efficiency of almost 200 per cent" ought to be the clincher, here... unless, of course, in its quest to provide adequate cooling for a G5-based portable, Apple has inadvertently invalidated the laws of thermodynamics.

On the other hand, if that's actually the case, we're just itching to preorder the first commercially available Entropy Inverter; why, we could cancel the maid service and the thing would pay for itself in no time flat...