You know that old sci-fi saw where there's an alien who's crash-landed on earth and he tells the locals he needs two gallons of an incredibly rare substance called "water" to power his ship, but all he has to pay for it is a hold full of worthless diamonds and gold? You catch our drift; it's the whole "value is relative and you may not know it" spiel. And of course similar stuff happens in real life all the time-- usually sans alien life forms, we assume, but you get tourists massively overtipping people because they can't do the exchange rates in their heads, mothers tossing out "ratty old comic books" worth thousands of dollars, that sort of thing. Case in point: someone showing up in a Mac users' forum and saying that he's got "a number of Apple prototypes in clear plastic cases" and "a prototype of a product which [has] never seen the light of day out of Apple," and then asking what it "might be worth to people who collect Apple stuff."

Because we strongly suspect that the correct answer is probably "a crapload." Yes, that's the technical term.

Check it out: faithful viewer ProcrasT8 tipped us off to the MacRumors forum thread in question, where this gentleman claims to own a clear Macintosh SE, a clear Mac LC, and a clear PowerBook Duo complete with a clear Duo Dock. There's even photos of the clear Duo 270 (with a regulation grey battery, keyboard, and trackball). Since none of these products ever shipped with a clear plastic case, either someone went to a lot of trouble to retrofit them with custom plastics, or the guy's telling the truth and these are genuine Apple prototypes. In which case, of course, several foaming-at-the-mouth Apple fans would gladly trade both kneecaps to own them.

But wait-- what about this alleged prototype of an unreleased product? Well, he's got photos of that, too, and it's apparently a tablet-based Mac that's more or less a Duo-- less in the sense that it utterly lacks the Duo's built-in keyboard, trackball, and hinging screen, and more because the fixed screen that sits where the keyboard and trackball would be is touch-sensitive and there's a stylus included for cursor control and improved Newton-based handwriting input. So there you go, Mac Tablet fanatics: Apple built one roughly a decade ago, but it never got past the prototype stage. Of course, at some point you can probably buy this fella's working prototype, though you might have to trade both your kneecaps and your right arm and tens of thousands of dollars to snag it.

Anyway, this isn't quite the same situation as the alien begging to trade diamonds for water, because the guy who owns all this stuff worked for Apple (which is how he wound up with it in the first place), so at least he knows it's worth something to collectors-- which is why we won't be surprised if it all shows up on eBay sometime soon and fetches ridiculous wads of cash. For those of you who don't have ridiculous wads of cash, well, think of it this way: at least you got to see some pretty pictures, you learned details of a scrapped Apple product that was years ahead of its time, and none of it cost you squat. Now that's a pretty good deal to any life form.