few years ago, when Steve Jobs introduced Apple's popular iMac computer, his archrival, Bill Gates, groused that Apple had reduced innovation in the personal computing world to translucent colored plastics.

"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Mr. Gates, the head of Microsoft, said at a conference for financial analysts at the time, News.com said. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."

Now Apple Computer is dissing back.

The centerpiece at Mr. Gates's annual Winhec computer hardware conference, held last week in New Orleans, was a futuristic prototype of an office computer Microsoft designed with the Hewlett-Packard Company. The prototype is the Athens PC.

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Futuristic, that is, except to a number of computer industry veterans who said that Microsoft and Hewlett were leaning too heavily on industrial design ideas that had originated with Apple — like a spacious flat-panel display the shape of a movie screen and a light-emitting-diode do-not-disturb feature embedded into the translucent plastic of the Athens's curvy case.

Not only has Apple been selling cinema-style flat panel displays for several years, but last year it filed patent application 20030002246, titled "active enclosure for computing device," which describes a machine that contains an array of rainbow-hued light-emitting diodes.

Apple executives took obvious glee last week in noting that the software centerpiece of the Microsoft conference, new graphics software that is scheduled to appear in "Longhorn," Microsoft's 2005 version of its Windows operating system, apes features that have been in Apple's OS X operating system since 2001.

"You don't have to look too far to see that this is almost a direct copy of Quartz," said Philip W. Schiller, Apple's vice president of marketing, referring to the Macintosh software that controls the computer's display.

Microsoft executives declined to take the bait. "We only showed glimpses of the future of Longhorn," said a Microsoft spokesman. "Wait until the fall when we'll go into more detail at the Professional Developers Conference."