Heads up-- there's less than two weeks left until Seybold and its attendant action-packed Steve Jobs keynote address. And do you suppose that Steve's going to get up in front of thousands of members of Apple's lucrative "content creation" market without introducing something big, and probably expensive? He'd be more likely to breakdance naked onstage than to pass up a golden opportunity to get the big-budget graphics crowd foaming at the mouth over some new "gotta have it" Mac gear. (By the way, did anyone else just go to a scary visual place just then?)

But here's the problem; it's only been a month since Macworld Expo, when Steve trotted out the dual-processor, gigabit-Ethernet Power Mac G4 and the itty-bitty Cube. Only the most insanely optimistic, medication-skipping Mac fans could even imagine that Apple's professional desktop systems are already ripe for an upgrade-- and with the G4 still stuck at 500 MHz, what would Steve do, throw a third G4 in there just for fun? So that leaves only one candidate for a revision: the PowerBook, whose current incarnation is six months old. Granted, six months isn't a terribly long life cycle where Apple's products are concerned, but it's not unheard of, either. So personally, we wouldn't be all that surprised if Steve trotted out PowerBook speed bumps/RAM boosts/disk boosts/price reductions.

One thing we don't expect to see, though, is an honest-to-goodness, supercomputer-to-go PowerBook G4. Despite what Mac OS Rumors says about "400-500 MHz 'Nitro' reduced-power/temperature G4 processors" making their way into Apple's portable product line-up in a couple of weeks, we just can't see it. Maybe you can chalk it up to victim's pessimism brought on by constant disappointments from Motorola, but we're not expecting a laptop-friendly G4 until much later this year-- though, of course, pleasant surprises are always welcome. And what this? Faithful viewer Rick Frank spotted a reference to a PowerBook G4 in a product description listed over at MacMall. It's probably just a simple mistake, but miracles have been known to happen-- even a few that don't involve the appearance of Elvis in a tortilla. (Incidentally, the PowerBook Zone has an excellent article enumerating the various and sundry reasons why such a major PowerBook overhaul doesn't stand much of a chance of showing up at Seybold.)

The other (remote) possibility, though, is that Steve will surprise everyone by filling in the mysterious sixth slot in Apple's revised product grid. The Cube is targeted at people who want G4 power in a super-stylish package but don't need all the expandibility of a full-fledged Power Mac. Based on that, we can imagine that Apple might finally address the segment of its portable market that's been clamoring for a thin-and-light subnotebook ever since the 2400 went the way of all silicon. At one point Steve himself had mentioned publicly that Apple was working on an "executive" laptop: something small and stylish that's more suited to the business traveler who wants to write memos and check email on the road, without having to lug around a portable video production studio. So perhaps a laptop analogous to the Cube is gearing up for Seybold-- though the nude breakdancing scenario doesn't sound all that less likely. Who's got the Vegas odds?

Ah, the Apple-Dell rivalry; it's been awfully good to us here at AtAT. From Mike Dell's original public comment about shutting Apple down, to Steve's retaliatory verbal jabs at the Power Mac G3 unveiling, to the unspoken years-long war as Apple knocked Dell out of the top spot for inventory management and Dell tried so hard to ape Apple's products and consumer appeal... it's been one heck of a ride. Back in 1997, Steve offered Mike Dell a little public warning: "With our new products, and our new store, and our new build-to-order manufacturing, we're coming after you, buddy." At the time, we thought it was just idle grandstanding and chest-thumping, but an article in the Sydney Morning Herald indicates that Steve and his loyal followers meant business. Serious business.

The Herald caught up with Apple Money Czar Fred Anderson when he was in Australia recently, and Fred had a few choice things to say about Apple's financial situation. "The most significant turnaround in recent business history" is now complete, he announced, and Apple is free once again to be "the cool company" ready to focus on innovation. All those great new products they've been pumping out translate into some significant revenue growth for Apple; Fred expects the company to post a revenue of about $8 billion for the year ending September 30th, up from $6 billion the year before-- a 35% year-over-year increase. Not too shabby, right? But more to the point, those numbers might have Mike on the run; "Apple expects to eclipse Dell as the fastest growing computer company this quarter."

My, my, my... first inventory, and now growth. Can a Dell-beating revenue be far behind? Well, yes, it can, given how huge Dell is, especially in the enterprise market. And Fred himself reiterates (much to some Apple-watchers' chagrin) what various Apple execs have said time and time again: "We're not going into the larger enterprise market." So don't expect Apple to come anywhere close to Dell's annual $25 billion anytime soon. (At least, not until Mac OS X has been out for a year and Apple announces the Apple Store for Corporate Purchasing, but that's a whole 'nother story.) In the meantime, we guess we'll just have to settle for Apple soon becoming the "fastest growing computer company." What a crying shame...

We've heard it over and over again through the years: the prediction that "someday soon" CRTs will be a thing of the big, clunky, energy-inefficient, radiation-emitting past, and all computer displays will be LCDs instead. The reality, of course, has so far been quite a bit different; with a 15-inch LCD display costing on the order of a cool grand, and a cheap 17-inch CRT costing about as much as a deluxe pizza (okay, a really deluxe pizza), it's not too hard to figure out why CRTs are still so popular. Money talks.

But when we thought about it for a bit, it seems like Apple is indeed moving quickly into the all-LCD future. Look at the company's current product line. The portables all have LCDs, of course. Of the three desktop classes, only one comes with a CRT: the iMac. The other two require a separate display. Now look at Apple's displays. There are three models-- and only one is CRT-based. Meaning, if you stick to all-Apple technology, in terms of product configurations, the LCD is indeed winning. And you just know that Apple would love to dump its remaining CRT-based products, if only cost factors would let them. As soon as LCDs get significantly cheaper, you can bet that Apple will be telling its CRTs not to let the door whack them in the electron gun on the way out.

So when will LCDs come way down in price? Beats us-- but Macworld has a report that can only be good news. Remember a year ago, when Apple sunk $100 million into Samsung to help ensure that it'd have a good supply of LCD screens from the manufacturer? Well, that little investment may be about to pay off big-time; Samsung has announced that it's just opened a brand new production line at its factory in Korea, which is capable of churning out 270,000 14.1-inch LCD screens each month. And that capacity is likely to double next year, so Apple should have a much easier time grabbing all the screens it needs to keep up with consumer demand.

Add to that the fact that The Register is saying that the years-long global LCD shortage is finally winding to a close (with prices on various sizes of the screens having dropped anywhere between 15 and 40% since January), and Apple might be bringing the all-LCD revolution to its customers sooner than you'd expect. It's probably going to be at least a year before the first flat-panel iMac makes an appearance, but once it does, you can pretty much kiss the CRT goodbye-- and good riddance.