OK
Its' a Fake... a great Fake!
I followed this one when it surfaced last time.
Was going to list reasons and then came across an appleturns.com article
which did it all for me. Cool!
You can see it on the site or below as I have included it in this post
@:-JeX
------------
Why lookee here, Vern-- our mailbox just exploded. Why, you ask? Because
every single human being on the planet (along with at least thirty
percent of the remaining mammalian population) just had to email us
about that spiffy new "iWalk" that Apple is allegedly preparing to
unveil come Monday. If you've somehow managed to avoid hearing about
this, you can get educated over at SpyMac.com, where you'll have to
register to get access to the site's many pictures and videos of the PDA
device. (Faithful viewer jSun notes a mirror site, though at production
time we weren't having much luck with it.)
So why is everyone rushing to tell us about this puppy? Well, quite
simply, because it looks like the greatest thing since Smuckers put
peanut butter and jelly together in one convenient jar and called it
Goober Grape. The iWalk is allegedly an iPodesque largish handheld that
boasts a generous color screen, real-time true handwriting recognition,
FireWire and audio in/out ports, a jog dial, and some "mystery" port
that SpyMac guesses to be the mysterious Gigawire we've all heard
bandied around the rumor mill lately. And indeed, based on the text
description, those luscious photos, and those three scrumptious videos,
the iWalk would be exactly the PDA we'd want if it didn't lack one
crucial feature: an actual existence in this plane of reality.
Sorry to burst your bubbles, folks, but the official AtAT stance is that
the iWalk is still just a hoax-- although now it's a much better hoax
than it used to be. Faithful viewers will recall that SpyMac first
appeared last October with its claims of an iWalk PDA; they said that it
would be the "breakthrough digital device" that would be unveiled at
Apple's mysterious press briefing. Of course, we got the iPod instead,
and we weren't surprised, especially since SpyMac's "spy photos" of the
iWalk were pretty darn unconvincing-- to us, anyway. A 3D rendering
inserted into a grainy digital photograph does not an Apple product make.
These new "photos," however, are a lot more convincing, and the videos
look just plain fantastic. Unfortunately, there are a slew of reasons
why we're sure that the iWalk is no more real than Regis Philbin:
• Why does this new iWalk look completely different from the iWalk
photos that SpyMac posted in October? Are we supposed to believe that
Apple completely redesigned the product in two months' time? C'mon,
people-- they're good, but no one's that good.
• We mentioned this last time, but it bears repeating: SpyMac.com is
registered to a German gentleman named Holger Ehlis, who also happens to
own ehlis-design.de. Back during the first iWalk hoax, the Ehlis Design
web site contained a lot of 3D renderings of proposed Mac mock-ups.
Those pics were quickly yanked once the proprietor noticed that some
people were making the connection and SpyMac's credibility was
spiralling down the toilet. Faithful viewer Jens Baumeister confirms
that Ehlis is "the graphics person for a German magazine called MacLife"
and that he put together these mock-ups last summer.
• Take a gander at the desk in some of those photos and videos. There's
a distinctly German electrical outlet set into it, and German speech is
audible in the background of one of the videos. Now, there are a couple
of explanations for this. The first is that Apple allowed a top secret
prerelease product not just out of the building, but out of the country
a week before it's supposed to go public. The second is that, hey, some
German guy faked this whole thing. Now, where are we going to find a
German guy with experience in making fake Macs? Hmmmm...
• Looks like ol' Holger should have stuck with the stills, because
while those videos look amazing at first glance, upon closer study
they're quite definitely fake. Step through the third one frame by frame
and you'll notice that the person's fingers move long before the iWalk's
jog dial does-- and then it "jumps" to catch up. There's also a telltale
notch cut out of the fingers' shadow in a couple of frames that is
distinctly unnatural. The text in the second video also does a jittery
sort of thing which hints strongly that everything on the iWalk's screen
was pasted in as the video was composed, but it's the jumping jog
dial/notched shadow that clinched it for us.
So that's our take on it; the iWalk is a hoax, albeit the best darn hoax
we've yet encountered in this biz. If we're wrong, we'll eat crow in the
appropriate manner (or, at least, vegan soy-based crow substitute), but
we're not exactly preheating the oven, if you catch our drift. We
actually hope that we are wrong, because we'd love an iWalk of our very
own, but we strongly suggest that you don't get your hopes up for this
Monday's Stevenote-- at least not for an iWalk. (By the way, please
don't email us asking for copies of the pictures or videos-- we're not
keeping them.)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Feb 01 2002 - 16:01:48 EST