Whoa, hold the phone, Clem! We know you were probably planning to skip next month's Macworld Expo because you made the perfectly reasonable assumption that the keynote address was going to be delivered by someone on the slightly blah side of the bell curve, like maybe senior finance veep Pete Oppenheimer, or an inanimate carbon rod-- or worse yet, Jon Rubinstein with an extended remix of last year's infamous Megahertz Myth presentation. We still have flashbacks. Pity us.

But screw on that travelin' hat and point it towards the Big Apple, because IDG Expos dropped a major bombshell yesterday: according to an official press release, the keynote is actually going to be delivered by none other than-- brace yourselves, here-- Steve Jobs himself! (Ideally we would have passed this mindblowing news along to you as soon as we heard it yesterday, but frankly, we were completely overwhelmed by the sheer wonder of it all and needed time to recover from the shock. Plus, there were a whole slew of The Adventures of Pete and Pete episodes on the TiVo.)

We know this whole "Steve's doing the keynote" scenario sounds highly unlikely, and you're right to be a tad suspicious-- but if you're thinking that the press release is just someone's idea of an elaborate joke, the prankster is one thorough guy, since he's also apparently hacked the official Macworld Expo web site to list Steve as the headliner on the Keynote & Feature Presentation page. Assuming it's legit, the Stevester will "deliver another groundbreaking keynote presentation" (in technical terms, he will "do his thang") on Wednesday, July 17th at 9 AM. And that's not all! It's not enough that His Steveness will deign to grace us with his physical presence; reportedly he's also going to wow us, too. Quoth the CEO of IDG World Expo, "Steve's keynote is likely to have a few surprises for us all."

Wait, so Steve's going to deliver the keynote-- and there are going to be surprises, too?! Holy Hannah, this is totally unprecedented; we need to lie down and breathe into a paper bag.

So get out there and Steve it up; for what it's worth, it's already too late for us here at AtAT Headquarters. We already passed on heading out for the keynote, and we've since made alternate and unchangeable plans to wash our hair that day. It's sad, we know, but there simply wasn't any way we could have known that we'd be missing what promises to be a positively mesmerizing performance by the Big Steve himself. Okay, sure, it's true that Mr. Jobs has delivered the keynote at every single New York Macworld Expo thus far (including the one he wasn't even supposed to attend), but hey, it just so happens that we've got the pattern recognition skills of a narcoleptic whippet on crack-- so without an official announcement, there was simply no way we could possibly have predicted Steve's scheduled presence at the event. We blame society. Thank heaven for streaming QuickTime, hmmmm?

While it obviously takes a major backseat to IDG's startling revelation that Uncle Steve will be taking the reins during next month's Expo keynote, Apple issued a nifty press release of its own yesterday-- one that just happens to be chock full of Educationy Goodness. You haven't forgotten that the education market is one of Apple's strongholds, right? After all, Apple does its best to remind us all of that fact at least once a year... coincidentally enough, at right about this time, during the annual National Educational Computing Conference. Last year we got "Apple Demonstrates Major Commitment To Education at NECC," the year before that was "Apple Demonstrates Its Leading Education Solutions at NECC," etc. It's sort of an annual tradition, like St. Patrick's Day. Only with slightly less green beer.

Anyway, let's see what Apple's pushing this year, shall we? First and foremost is PowerSchool 3.0, the latest version of the "industry leading web-based student information system" that Apple bought last year in a bid to secure some sort of new foothold in the schools even as its market share tumbled. Reportedly this newest incarnation of the software features improved ease of use (no doubt the result of Apple slapping its legendary spit and polish on what used to be another company's product), Mac OS X client support, an "Integrated Master Schedule Builder" for automating-- what else?-- the building of schedules, and the ability for teachers "to easily drag and drop student photos into online seating charts." And heck, if that last feature doesn't get school districts budgeting thousands of dollars for the upgrade, nothing will.

So what else does Apple have to trot out in front of the NECCies this year? Well, in addition to the killer app of online seating charts that now boast actual photos, the company just took the wraps off of the Apple Learning Interchange... sort of. The press release describes the ALI as "a new online resource for teaching, learning, research, and collaboration," but the term "new" is apparently relative-- the ALI first appeared on AtAT over two full years ago. On the other hand, the Apple Digital Campus Curriculum ("providing educators with rich, project-based curricula and relevant assignments that solve real-world education needs") sounds new, but it may well just be the new name for Apple Learning Professional Development ("help[s] teachers and school leaders fully integrate technology for teaching and learning"). And then, of course, there's the stuff that's definitely new: the eMac and the Xserve.

All told, that's some pretty compelling stuff for the schools to chew on. And it's nice to see that John Couch is already in there pitching, being quoted in an Apple press release barely a week after being named Apple's veep of education: "Apple continues to lead the industry with innovative products that uniquely address the needs of education. While other companies are happy to just sell technology to schools, Apple designs products like the eMac and iBook specifically for education." Ooooo... "to just sell"? Kudos on leaping in feet first and all, Mr. Couch, but while splitting an infinitive isn't the perceived crime it once was, doing so in a press release targeted at educators might not be the best way to get on their good side. Then again, anyone out there who'd let a district purchasing decision be influenced by something like a split infinitive probably tossed all the Macs when "Think different" hit the airwaves...

Just a quick heads-up to all those viewers who keep writing in to ask when Apple is going to stick a G4 in the iBook: give it a rest. It's not that we mind being asked; after all, we are the shadowy and all-powerful consortium who tells Apple's hardware designers exactly when to incorporate new technologies into each product line (c'mon, like you never suspected!). It's just that we're just a little concerned that you might be causing yourselves undue grief and frustration by waiting for an event that's probably still a long ways off. The iBook's pretty happy with a G3 under its hood; we see little reason to push it.

And if you don't believe us (for whatever bizarre reason your fevered little brain has concocted), maybe you'll believe Apple itself. MacCentral recently spoke to Apple's "director of consumer-education mobile products" Dave Russell, and Dave asserts that the 600/700 MHz G3 chips powering the current iBooks pack "plenty of punch" and yield "quite fine" performance for education/consumer purposes. He even goes so far as to say that the G3 "runs Mac OS X just fine," which is just about the ringingest endorsement we've yet heard for Apple's latest operating system running on a pre-G4 chip. For what it's worth, the AtAT staff runs Mac OS X on a 400 MHz G3, and we find it a little pokey, but we'd agree with Dave's assessment that performance is "just fine." As in, "How's it run?" "Fine." "Not good? Not great?" "No. Just... fine."

Still, his arguably slightly overcharitable impression of G3 performance notwithstanding, Dave makes some pretty solid points about why the iBook probably won't move to a G4 any time soon. Really, it all boils down to one overriding concern: heatcostbatterylife. The iBook's sticker price needs to stay within the budget of the average consumer/education purchaser, and G3s are cheap. Better still, they draw a lot less power than a G4, which translates into longer battery life and a notebook that doesn't get hot enough to raise blisters when applied to bare skin. Gotta love that.

That isn't to say, of course, that the iBook won't get G4tified eventually; after all, it's the only Mac in Apple's line-up that still uses a G3 (except for the old 15-inch CRT iMacs, which even Apple is trying to downplay as a "current" product). Lots of people point to the symmetry in Apple's pro/consumer/desktop/laptop product grid and insist that since the new iMacs have G4s, the iBooks should have them, too, and there's a certain appealing logic to that argument-- but there's a reason why Apple stopped billing the iBook as an "iMac To Go."

The bottom line is that the iBook does what it needs to do for the people who are supposed to be buying it. For the rest of you, suck it up and splurge on a PowerBook; complaining about the inability to render real-time Final Cut Pro effects on an iBook is unseemly. Trust us-- keep it up, and people are going to start avoiding you at parties.