Pity poor ATI. The graphics company does appear to have aroused the wrath of Apple CEO Steve Jobs for daring to pre-announce some of the new Mac kit Jobs himself was set to unveil during his MacWorld Expo keynote t'other day.

ATI said in a MacWorld Expo exhibitors' write-up that Apple would be announcing a new iMac with ATI's Rage 128 4XL graphics chip, plus two new Power Mac G4s bundling Rage 128 Pro and Radeon graphics processors, respectively.

This is widely seen as an example of the Curse of Jobs, with the man being described - usually by unnamed sources - as flying into a rage and immediately excising all references to ATI from his keynote script.

That certainly fits Jobs' personality profile, but we suspect the absence of Radeon has more to do with ATI's ability to ship the chip in quantity than the pre-announcement, which didn't mention any pertinent details about the new Apple machines. Did Jobs pull a major supply contract for one of the most powerful graphics chips there is on the basis of a little-read press release? Possibly, but we doubt it. Why cancel Radeon only to replace it with another, lesser ATI chip? That doesn't make much sense to us.

It all points to ATI as the culprit, for not only pre-announcing Apple's machines but saying they contain chips the graphics company isn't yet supplying to the Mac maker. ®

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