Okay, we still haven't actually watched the Stevenote stream, but we just now fired it up solely to confirm the unthinkable. So after marveling at the image quality (which seems loads crisper than previous keynote streams), the widescreen aspect ratio, and the quick response when dragging to various points in the stream-- hooray for QuickTime 7 and H264, apparently-- lo and behold, the various faithful viewers who broke the news to us weren't kidding: Steve wasn't wearing blue jeans!

Which isn't to say that he wasn't wearing pants. He was. We're not saying he was standing up there in glow-in-the-dark Valentine's Day boxer shorts or just swingin' in the breeze or anything like that, so don't freak out.

But said pants clearly weren't his omnipresent ultra-casual blue jeans; they appear instead to be black chinos of some sort, which are still mostly casual and stylish and totally within the fashion range of His Steveness, but nevertheless mark a clear foray into the realm of the unfamiliar. Which leaves the door open for any Mac fans still mired in denial about this whole Intel migration thingy to explain how Steve could possibly have sold us all out to Intel: simply put, that wasn't Steve.

Yup, if you're desperate to rationalize how Steve could have ditched PowerPC for x86, just look at the pants and tell yourself that Steve was obviously kidnapped by Intel thugs and replaced by an exact double-- exact, that is, except for the telltale chinos. (Leave it to Wintellians to miss the fine details.) It's all part of an elaborate Intel plot to steal Apple from IBM as payback for IBM having lured Microsoft away on the Xbox 360 front. Simple, right?

Okay, so maybe it's not quite as simple or as likely an explanation as, say, "Steve spilled a mocha on his jeans ten minutes before the show and had to steal pants from a passing underling," or "Steve never got around to doing laundry this week and he's working his way back through his closet," or "Steve was the target of an experimental satellite-mounted Jeans-to-Chinos ray currently in testing by the Department of Defense." But Occam's Razor can be boring, and if thoughts of a far-reaching Intel conspiracy to replace the real Steve with an evil clone help you sleep better at night, more power to you; who's it gonna hurt?

Meanwhile, if the "just didn't get around to doing the laundry" scenario is the right one, we should probably all be thankful that Steve had only worked his way back to the chinos; another four days and the only clean thing he'd have had left would have been last year's Halloween costume. Then again, being told that Macs are going Intel was about as surreal as it gets; would being told by a man in a banana costume have been any weirder?