Hmmm, maybe we're not nearly as on top of things as we thought we were. After all, Robert Morgan has just posted an RFI Report over at MacWEEK vehemently denying that Apple would be shipping any G4-based Macs at next month's Macworld Expo. In addition, he's adamant that Apple also won't start shipping the P1 consumer portable or the new turbo-charged iMac until well after the early January festivities. Morgan seems to think that these rumors may actually be part of a deliberate misinformation campaign on Apple's part, intended to help them plug some of the leaks in the Great Wall of Cupertino.

Now, what took us by surprise about the whole situation wasn't that RFI is contradicting claims that Apple would ship all this cool new stuff next month; rather, what surprised us was that anyone had thought otherwise. After all, production-level G4 processors are barely expected to have poked their heads out of their burrows by next month, we thought, and everything we've heard indicates that they won't find their way into Macs before at least the middle of next year. The spruced-up iMac, meanwhile, seems likely to make an appearance sometime between February and May, but given Apple's big push to sell as many current iMacs as possible during the holiday season, we just can't imagine that Apple would leap out of the bushes five days after New Year's and yell "Surprise! New iMacs! Don't you wish you had waited? Suckers!" Wouldn't be prudent. And as for the P1, about the most we thought anyone was expecting at the Expo was a product unveiling, but certainly not an announcement that the portables were actually available for purchase.

And yet there was the prediction, right in front of our faces, right at the top of a recent Don Crabb article in MacCentral. Yes, we had read it. In fact, we had even referred to it in yesterday's episode, in which we discussed Apple's impending holiday shutdown. Somehow we just completely spaced on the news up top that Apple would be shipping all this cool gear next month; we'd like to think that our minds automatically filtered out the absurdity, but the truth of the matter is, we're probably just getting absent-minded in our old age. Chalk it up to impending birthdays coupled with holiday stress. (By the way, if Apple does ship this stuff next month, we're going to amass a pretty hefty post-holiday credit card bill-- but we're spending with impunity anyway, because we figure we have a better chance of winning the lottery than of having to budget for a G4 in January.)

Uh-oh-- now there's still more evidence that Apple's got to overcome a fair bit of momentum if they really want to reverse the Windows migration in the education market. According to a MacTimes article, Apple's just lost a bid for a hefty contract with the Colorado Springs School District 11; notorious Mac-bleeders Intergraph grabbed the business instead. (Intergraph, as you probably know, has been selling Windows boxes to the Mac market for ages now, pulling customers to the Dark Side.) What's worse, Apple reportedly lost the bid on the same day as Steve Jobs' CAUSE98 keynote, where he reaffirmed Apple's commitment to the educational computer market.

The school district stated that among their primary reasons for going with Intergraph is that company's expertise in integrating multiple platforms in a seamless networked computing environment. Fair enough, but we suspect that the final decision just came down to The Great Divider: price. As cool as the iMac is, and as suitable as it is for a school lab environment, at roughly $1100 per unit in the educational market, they're expensive compared to many of the Wintel options available for schools. Our guess is, that's overshadowing a lot of factors like reliability, support costs, and stuff like that. Heck, Steve Jobs knows that-- in his CAUSE keynote, he plainly admitted that Apple is "too expensive" and that he intends to start changing that.

For an in-depth look at Apple's plans to "wade back into higher education" (and hopefully the K-12 market as well), the Chronicle of Higher Education has a pretty good article. Can Apple pull it off? Well, considering that no one ever thought that they could ever break back into the home market, either, we're going to let the future unfold.

Ah, the classic iMac-inspired debate: to floppy, or not to floppy? When Apple announced a new consumer Mac that would ship without a standard floppy drive, by some reactions out there you'd think they announced that the iMac would also ship with a required human treadmill for power and the Amazing Zero-Button Mouse™. The arguments "for" are compelling: 3.5" floppy drives are in just about every personal computer in use today, and omitting them in the iMac was sure to introduce compatibility problems in several environments; how would kids bring work home from school, for instance? And yet, the arguments "against" were pretty darn good, too: floppies are slow, unreliable, and ridiculously low-capacity for many uses in today's world. The question of which side is right will likely never be answered-- toss it in the "boxers or briefs?" file.

Luckily, just as with your choice of underwear style, you can also choose whether or not you want or need a floppy drive for your iMac. Several vendors are working on drives that you can hook up to your little blue buddy, whether it's by the plug-and-play glory of USB, or some much less friendly hack such as soldering a standard floppy connector to your iMac's motherboard. And while you'll have to shell out something like $100 for the joy of using all those AOL diskettes you found in your MacWarehouse shipments and the bottoms of cereal boxes, it's an option nonetheless. This is not news. What is news, after a fashion, is that if you're really enamored of the whole floppy scene, you can actually have two floppy drives hooked up to your iMac simultaneously. Really. MacCPU did it, for instance.

While we question the necessity of having one floppy drive for your iMac, we admit, there's something incredibly cool about having two of them. Actually, we suspect that you might be able to add as many USB floppy drives to your iMac as you want, though we're not at all sure of that fact. (MacCPU added a USB drive and also a standard drive soldered to the motherboard.) Imagine if it's true-- if you were rich and absurd, you could stun the the world with your 127-floppy drive iMac. We see a huge rack of USB floppy drives, and an iMac desktop filled with "Install AOL" floppy icons as far as the eye can see. What a beautiful dream...