Wuh-oh, now Apple's in for it: the consumer watchdog groups are on its case! (Dun-dun-dun-DUNNNNNNN!) Faithful viewer Steve Chambers slid us a CNET article which reports that Apple has been contacted by the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, who advised the company against making "comparative performance claims" in future marketing campaigns. Why? Well, apparently the NAD has taken issue with what it describes as Apple's "broad, unqualified claims" that the Power Mac G5 was "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer."

If those concerns sound familiar to you, it's probably because you remember every Wintel user on the planet simultaneously going into clinical shock when Apple originally introduced the G5 and the accompanying "world's fastest" claims last summer; their brains simply imploded, and Apple was roundly accused of cheating on its benchmarks, though Apple gave scads of data about its benchmark setup and no one (including Intel) was ever able to prove anything unfair. Nevertheless, that didn't stop a British television commission from banning Apple's G5 commercial from the airwaves because it felt that the "world's fastest" claim was unjustified-- and now it appears that the BBB shares that opinion.

Oh, but that's not all: the NAD also took issue with Apple's claim that the G5 processor was "the world's first 64-bit processor for personal computers," arguing that it "could reasonably be interpreted to apply to workstations," and suggested that Apple change it. So let us get this straight, here: the NAD wants Apple to take its claim that the G5 is-- and we quote-- "the world's first 64-bit processor for personal computers" and modify the claim to-- and we quote again-- "limit it to personal computers."

Is it just us? Are we hallucinating the phrase "for personal computers" in Apple's existing claim, or did someone at the NAD just forget to take his "Duh" pill this morning? Whatever. For its part, Apple notified the NAD that the G5 marketing campaign that's causing so much trouble had "run its course" ages ago, but promised to "be mindful of NAD's views in its future advertising." (Kudos to Apple for taking the high road, because our response would likely have consisted largely of four-letter words that are definitely unfit for broadcast.)

Meanwhile, why did the BBB get involved in the first place, especially this late in the game? Well, believe it or not, it's because Dell went crying to mommy. No, honestly! NAD got into the act because of "a tip from Apple rival Dell," who says it "notified NAD because [it] felt there were some inaccuracies in Apple's advertisement and wanted to act on behalf of consumers in the marketplace who deserve accurate information on which to base their purchase decisions."

Now, regardless of how you feel about the accuracy of Apple's marketing claims (they are marketing claims, after all-- how come no one got on Intel's case when its ads implied that using a Pentium 4 would give you faster downloads?), those Xserve G5s must really have Dell quaking in its boots to make them pull a cheap stunt like calling the BBB. Here's a little taste of what Dell's going through these days: you know all about the astronomical success of Virginia Tech's G5-based cluster, which is the darling of the supercomputing community. In stark contrast, as faithful viewer datafusion points out, the Dell cluster at the University of Buffalo is getting trashed in the press by the school's bioinformatics guy, who says it crashes all the time. Now he's buddying up to IBM, who, of course, made the chips that put Virginia Tech on the supercomputing map.

When faced with that kind of ickiness, no wonder Dell's siccing the BBB on Apple. Next up: having 200 anchovy pizzas delivered to One Infinite Loop in Steve Jobs's name...