Clearly the iTunes 4.5 announcement is going to overshadow pretty much every other nugget o' news in Macdom for a little while, so it's probably a good thing that nothing much else is happening, right? Especially since it lets us drop back and punt by revisiting a throwaway gag we made in yesterday's episode, but which, it turns out, may have some basis in reality. Or at least an alternate universe's reality. Bizarro reality. Whatever.

The gag we're talking about is that thing we said about how AirPort Update 3.4.1 might lead to a "dramatically increased RF output that cooks your kidneys after thirty minutes of continued use." Just hi-freakin'-larious stuff, right? We know, but it's the best we can scrape together at 4 AM. Well, while AirPort 3.4.1 apparently causes no such increase in radiation (and does fix most of the issues reported with the AirPort Update 3.4 of Death), apparently high- and low-level radiation fields emanating from laptop computers are a real concern with eco-friendly types-- at least in Germany. Faithful viewer joernl forwarded us an article from a German magazine called Öko-test, which decided to test a bunch of laptops to see how much radiation they, um, radiate.

Check out the Babelfish autotranslation if you need to, but joernl was kind enough to fill us in on the basic facts. Apparently, in stark contrast to our prediction of AirPort 3.4.1 boiling internal organs in vivo, Apple's iBook was the only tested system that kicked low-emissions kiester: "Only one equipment in the test, that with the new operating system Mac OS X 10,3 Panther equipped Notebook iBook G4 of the manufacturer Apple, keeps all TCO limit values and may therefore with the note 'very well' in the strahlenmessung decorate itself." For comparison's sake, three other notebooks were rated "satisfying," three more were "sufficiently" (!), and one was "unsatisfactory." Wow, the magazine isn't kidding when it states that "the wackeren folding computers produce often an unpleasant mix from electrical and magnetic fields." Those darn wackeren folding computers.

We can't say whether PowerBooks are as low-radiation as the iBooks are, but it still feels good to know that Apple's got a laptop that's far less likely to cause unpleasant cellular mutation than offerings from the Wintel crowd. And hey, is anyone surprised that the single "unsatisfactory" laptop, which joernl tells us kicks out ten times the recommended radiation limits, is a Dell Inspiron 510m? According to Öko-test, the Dell spits out radiation "within four ranges over the limit values," which we don't quite understand, but lordy, it can't be good.

Suddenly the whole "Dude, you're getting a Dell" thing starts to make sense: Steve the Dell Dude only acted like a simpering moron because he'd suffered radiation-related brain damage. (Clearly that was medical marijuana he was buying.) And hey, could this explain the behavior of those feeble-minded Dell interns, too-- and, dare we say, perhaps even the psychosis of the company's Steve-obsessed CEO? You heard it here first; apparently excessive radiation exposure causes idiocy, dementia, and rampant mediocrity. Alert the EPA.