By Kasper Jade
Published: 12:00 PM EST
Last week at this time, Apple Chief Executive Officer, Steve P. Jobs, was going through his stack of Macworld Expo speech cards with a big fat magic marker -- replacing almost all occurrences of the word "ATI" with streaks of black ink.
The two company's reportedly engaged in a scuffle earlier in the week when word spread of a public BusinessWire post from ATI staffers. The post provided advanced information on Apple's Macworld hardware announcements.
As a result, not only did Mr. Jobs remove all unnecessary mention of ATI and their graphics cards from the keynote, he also scrapped a portion of the presentation where an ATI executive was to take the stage and perform a demonstration of the company's new RADEON graphics cards for the Macintosh, sources said.
ATI's punishment didn't stop there, however. Insiders says Mr. Jobs demanded that all ATI RADEON card options be removed from the company's online store. An Italian Macintosh news site, MacProf, provided substantial proof of the rumor when they published a number of images revealing edited versions of Apple's original Power Mac G4 Cube Reference card.
Apple had originally planned to offer RADEON graphics card options on all of its Power Mac G4 based computers via their online Apple Store. Likewise, many of the Macworld show-floor Power Mac G4 and Power Mac G4 Cube models originally contained RADEON graphics cards. By the time the show floor opened, attendees would have never known.
"When examining the internals of the new Cube I noticed that the screw on the ATI Rage 128 graphics card was really loose and not well fastened," one anonymous sources told AppleInsider during last week's Macworld Expo. "The Apple employee guarding the cube said something to the effect that it wasn't re-tightened when the card was 'put back in.'"
Mr. Jobs backlash towards ATI may have gone even further had the company been successful in its ventures just a day before the keynote. According to extremely reliable industry sources, Jobs sent Apple's Director of OEM Engineering around the Macworld show floor on Tuesday with orders to obtain a competitor's graphics card to highlight during his keynote address in place of ATI's RADEON.
Apple was unsuccessful in their late attempts, for reasons that are yet unpublishable.
ATI Technologies has since apologized to Apple for their PR Blunder. Rumor has it that Apple will announce RADEON options via the Apple Store by the end of September.
