A series of photos and a movie were recently released that appeared to be a sneak peek at the new “iHome,” supposedly the “headless iMac” that is rumored to be the big release at MacWorld this week. The photos, at first glance, seem convincing, and a lot of people excitedly believed that these were genuine images of the real deal:

It would seem to be too elaborate to be a hoax, too well-produced.

But there are problems that people soon started pointing out: first, the font is wrong; Apple uses Myriad, but the typeface on the box in the photos is called Frutiger. The box itself is in fact an iBook box. The handle on the box is positioned so that if held, the printing on the side of the box would be upside-down. Apple would release this in the US first, and so would not use the British “Centre” spelling. “iHome” is not yet trademarked by Apple. And people in the know say that the styrofoam fitting is imperfect, as well as many other small details. But if none of this is proof enough for you, look at this:

First of all, you can see the piece of paper with the fake name attached to the box pretty clearly. They did not even seem to glue the edges down very well, or used too heavy a paper–you can see the raised leading edge of the paper showing as a contrasty white line about a quarter- to a half-inch from the front edge of the box, highlighted in red in the bottom part of the image. The red circle shows the corner of the box which seems to be dented, unlikely for a brand-new box in its packing. This next photo seals the deal as far as the attached piece of paper is concerned:

Some people also point to the lack of RCA/S-Video ports as proof, but there is a port on the back (second from far right) that could be a custom video-out jack like that used on some Apple portables, which uses a converter cable to lead to RCA and S-Video (come to think of it, the ports almost look like they were stolen from an iBook; the ports shown here have a gap between the firewire and USB ports, and there are two firewire ports instead of one, but aside from that, they match the iBook ports exactly). But there is enough overwhelming evidence otherwise to conclusively prove this to be a fake.

But who knows? Apple is not new to the game of rumor-mongering. Perhaps they are responsible for this, trying to discredit the rumors which they obviously believe are far too close to the mark this year (considering their lawsuit against Think Secret). A fake like this could make people think twice. Or, for all we know, there is a new machine that looks just like this and Apple made the fake to throw people off from it. Doubtful, of course.

One thing for sure: this is generating a lot of buzz for the upcoming Expo, and that can’t be bad for Apple at all. We all love rumors, getting a sneak peek. But let’s just wait for the real deal. After all, rumors in the past have heightened our expectations too high from time to time, leading to disappointments. So just wait and see.