This video is making the rounds lately -- on first glance, it looks someone running the iPhone OS on a Mac Pro with a 24" multitouch monitor. As you can see, everything more or less works as you'd expect, and therein lies the rub: anyone who's looked at it with a critical eye, including our friend and former TUAW-er CK Sample III, has pronounced it fake. I'd have to agree -- besides the fact that it comes from a visual effects house, the picture flipping at about :56 is a little bit off. How'd they do it? It's most likely just a movie running on a screen, with a guy pretending to control it. But even so, it's a compelling idea -- if you could find a multitouch monitor that worked like that and ran the iPhone OS with it, wouldn't it work exactly that way anyway?

I've actually brought up this idea before -- there is a ton of software running on the iPhone currently, and some of it is even better than the equivalent versions on the Mac. It would be extremely useful to port the iPhone's OS (and all of its software in the App Store) to another form, whether that be on your TV (I originally suggested a Wii-like interface) or on a multitouch input like this desktop. Apple has sunk a lot of work and design thought into this OS -- they may never do it, but it seems like it would be a terrific decision to bring some of that successful R&D back on to the TV or the desktop.

I love Tom's Hardware -- they're traditionally a PC site (and being a gamer, I've built and run my share of PCs), but like most PC guys, they aren't afraid to lay out the specs and draw direct conclusions from there. And that's exactly what they've done with a very Mac misconception: that Apple computers traditionally cost more than the average PC.

To the average user, that seems true -- if you go to, say, a Best Buy or a Circuit City, and look at the Macs they're selling versus the seemingly equivalent PCs they're selling, then yes, you're seeing higher pricetags on the Apple stuff. But when Tom's lays out what you get out of each computer, the prices are generally the same. In fact, they even build an equivalent Mac Pro, and there's only a $5.67 difference.

Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying to prove otherwise (Apple, you'll note, is not a client of NPD, and they don't actually share which computers they're talking about in the study). And of course, as Tom's Hardware commenters will tell you, there's really no argument for gamers yet, as amazing hardware is nothing when it doesn't run your software the way it should. But it's good to see TH taking a serious, relatively unbiased look at the price differences, and Apple getting a little more love from the traditionally PC crowd.