Where's the beef? Steve may be vegan (heck, so are we), but that's hardly an excuse; we bet there are a heckuva lotta Mac fanatics pulling a Clara Peller right about now. Is it just us, or did that Stevenote seem... well, a little light on surprises, relatively speaking? There was no "one more thing," not even one as anticlimactic as last summer's iDVD 2. The big announcement was the new flat-screen iMac, but every Mac-using sentient being with a pulse knew that was a sure thing-- even before Time Magazine signed its own death warrant last night, which we'll get to later. And nothing against iPhoto, of course, which looks positively spiffing, but again, the rumor addicts already had that classified as a lock. About the only part that actually surprised us (since we received a divine waxy build-up about that "Mac OS X as default operating system" a week before Christmas) was the introduction of a new iBook model with a 14-inch screen.

But here's the real difference between this keynote let-down and, for instance, the one last summer: whereas last time the rumor mill raised expectations too high (at least we were prepared for reality back then), this time Apple has no one to blame but itself. When faced with unprecedented levels of hype, were we unreasonable to expect unprecedented levels of shock and amazement? Were we wrong to think that Apple's own assertion that these announcements would be "way beyond the rumors sites" meant something other than iBook price drops, the shipping of an image-editing application that the rumor mill has been talking about for months now, and the unveiling of a G4-based flat-screen iMac that most people expected six months ago?

Don't get us wrong-- we're pretty happy with the announcements made today. Finally, Apple has really and truly eliminated the CRT from its product line, and the iMac has graduated to G4 status and even has a pretty affordable SuperDrive option. iBooks (which were already great values) are now even cheaper, and those of you with weaker eyes can avoid the squints by ponying up for the model with the 14-inch screen. Apple finally has an iApp that brings the elegance of the Mac experience to digital cameras, and with iPhoto's wonderful ability to allow users to order prints and even hardbound books of their digital snapshots, it may just prove to be a killer app. Heck, even without all that good stuff, Steve's two, count 'em, two snarky comments about Photoshop's continued absence from the Mac OS X Hit Parade would have made it a thumbs-up event in our book.

But that still doesn't excuse the way that Apple hyped this show to the stars and then gave us a reality hovering maybe four feet above sea level. Seriously, what was it about today's presentation that was supposed to shock and awe us so? The fact that the iWalk (gasp!) didn't ship? The way that Steve and Jon Ive have apparently come to the unimpeachable conclusion that what consumers want more than anything else in this world is a computer that looks like a desk lamp? What? Maybe Steve was so flustered by the Great Time Press Leak that he just plumb forgot to announce his "one more thing": that the articulated display arm of the new iMacs are perfectly integrated with iTunes and can groove to the music like one of those dancing Coke cans. We can but hope.

Say, what about that new iMac? We've all been waiting for over three years for Apple to redesign the thing from scratch, and now we've finally seen the result. For a moment, try to ignore the hype that Apple heaped on it all last week (we know, it's hard) and consider it entirely upon its own merits. So what do you think-- was it worth the wait? Certainly the specs are impressive-- all the models are LCD-based, all of them boast G4s at 700 or 800 MHz, and they all pack a pretty respectable 32 MB nVIDIA GeForce2 MX graphics subsystem. And $1799 now gets you a complete Mac system, complete with an LCD display, capable of creating and burning DVDs. This is clearly all good stuff.

But the design... well, let's just say that we won't be surprised if we hear some people yearning for a return to the classic Space Egg chassis. Coming up with a desktop all-in-one design based around a flat panel obviously presented some challenges, and Uncle Steve made some good points during his speech about how orienting everything in the vertical plane of the screen would have necessitated slowing down the optical drive's rotational speed, etc. And the new design seems nicely functional, what with the free-floating display, despite Apple's decision to move all the ports back to the rear of the system-- and the power button, too. (On a related note, maybe it's just us, but after Steve's whole spiel about how consumer computers should always be all-in-one designs for simplicity's sake, we can't help but notice that those Pro Speakers are looking mighty external to us.)

The thing is, this design (which we've already taken to calling "Lump-Stick-Rectangle" just somehow doesn't seem as provocative as the original Space Egg. It's not as archetypal; it doesn't strike as resonant a chord. In short, it's kind of... well, blah might be the right word for it. In the intro video, the new iMac bobs and weaves, the screen goes bouncing every which way to the beat of the music; it seems alive (and, as dozens of faithful viewers have pointed out, not unlike Luxo, the Pixar mascot swing-arm lamp). That's all well and good, and the iMac looks pretty neat in that scenario. But in reality, it's just going to be sitting on a desk like a lump. And a stick, and a rectangle. People will occasionally-- maybe even frequently-- adjust its screen position, but that's a far cry from owning a computer that's going to get down and funky every time you crank up some Kool & The Gang.

So that's our main concern; not that the highish $1299 entry-level price point may scotch some sales in this economy, not that the $1299 model won't even ship until March, thus locking a lot of potential buyers out of spending their money-- but that the new design won't capture the imagination of the public like the original iMac's simple and stylized shape did. Think of it this way; do you think the new iMac is going to start showing up in comic strips anytime soon? (Well, other than Rockwood, we mean-- the guy who draws that is nuts to start with.)

A moment of silence, ladies and gentlemen, for whichever poor souls at Time Magazine lost their lives last night when Steve Jobs undoubtedly burst into their domiciles, ripped their hearts from their chests, and wolfed them down while they were still beating. Vegan, shmegan; it's a simple rule of survival in this digital age: "Incur not the Wrath of Steve, for terrible consequences shall befall thee." As far as we know, His Steveness is still picking bits of ATI executive out of his teeth from eighteen months ago. The penalty for ruining his surprises is, as everyone knows all too well, Big Ugly Violent Death.

In case you weren't aware, ATI's little July 2000 press release snafu ("Oops, we told everyone that there are going to be new iMacs two days before the Expo") pales in comparison to Time's massive wreck of a leak ("Oops, we showed everyone the new iMacs the day before the Expo"). As some two hundred faithful viewers informed us during the twelve hours prior to the start of the keynote, Time Canada apparently posted a full LCD iMac cover story on its web site, complete with full-color images, over half a day before Steve was scheduled to unveil his new baby. It was hours before someone at Time was woken up (presumably by the sound of Steve's teeth tearing at his sternum) and yanked the link to the story-- although the article itself remained, and by then the damage was done. This morning copies of those images were plastered all over the web, and copies of the article itself weren't hard to find, either. To make matters worse, the article also mentioned iPhoto, thus killing two surprises with one big, dumb stone.

Apparently Time neglected to pay very close attention to Apple's embargo on talking about the new iMac, because we seriously doubt that Apple forgot to mention, "hey, make sure you don't publish anything on that until after the keynote, okay?" For this grievous transgression, surely scores of Time management types have paid the ultimate price. And given that copies of the print magazine with the new iMac on the cover were available at some newsstands as early as last night, this obviously wasn't just the mistake of some hapless web guy.

We've yet to hear reports that all of Canada has been reduced to a vast smoking hole in the ground, and thus we have to say that we're proud of Steve's restraint. And if the fact that Apple gave a free copy of Time to everyone on the way out of the keynote indicates what we hope it does-- that the company mobilized its troops this morning to run out and buy every copy of Time in San Francisco in a valiant attempt to keep the big announcement under wraps-- well, heck, we're proud of that, too.