MMMMPPPHHHHAAAHAHAHAHAHAAA!! Aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha haaaaa haa haa ha ha! They just... Ahee hee hee hee heh heh ha ha ha! Aha ha! Oh, man, that's... HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE!! Hee hee hee hee hee hee hee! (sniffle) Ha ha ha ha ha haa haaaa! Ha ha ha! Ha.

Hee hee. Heh.

Aheh.

mmmmmmppppphhhhhhHAAAAAAHAHAHAHA!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Hee hee hee hee... HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE HEE! Aha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha. Aheh. Heh.

Okay, all better now.

If you don't know what just caused us to unload a mouthful of 18-hour-old mocha all over our Cinema Display and keyboard, you need to keep your ear a little closer to the ground, because you're missing out on comedy gold, people. Faithful viewer John Duffin was the first of many, many people to inform us that the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Indeed, said cat is not only out of the bag, it also ate said bag, which means it's pretty much as out of that particular bag as it gets. Yes, kiddies, Power Mac G5 specs have been leaked, and we think you'll judge the source to be pretty reliable as far as these things go: it was Apple.

"The devil you say!" Yessirree-Bob, people; apparently if you had been so lucky as to have been cruising the Apple Store between, say, 11:30 PM and midnightish Eastern time last night, you might have noticed that the specs for the Power Mac G4 suddenly seemed a little, well, unfamiliar. Scads of screenshots flooding our inbox show the Power Mac G4's listed specs as including "1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz, or Dual 2 GHz PowerPC G5 Processors; up to 1 GHz processor bus; up to 8 GB of DDR SDRAM; Fast Serial ATA hard drives; AGP 8x Pro; three PCI or PCI-X expansion slots; three USB 2.0 ports; one FW800, two FW400 ports; Bluetooth & AirPort Extreme ready; optical and analog audio in and out." Maybe it's just us, but that doesn't sound like any Power Mac G4 we've ever seen.

Apple has since rectified that minor inaccuracy (after apparently pulling the whole store offline in a mad panic), and the Apple Store now reports Power Mac G4 specs more in line with the universe we're used to inhabiting. But if you missed seeing the anomaly yourselves, you can visit MacRumors to check out one of many screenshots we expect to pepper the 'net over the course of the next day or so. Suddenly the question of what might be in those Big, Mysterious Boxes doesn't seem nearly as urgent, does it? We admit it, we feel a little bad for Steve. The man does like his surprises, after all, and we can't help feeling like this is going to spoil one of his great joys in life. But heck, we're sure he's got more surprises up his sleeve. If nothing else, he's got all weekend to learn how to do some card tricks.

So, basically, yeah, that's the whole story. Either someone at Apple screwed up enormously and his raggedly decapitated corpse is even now slowly cooling on a pike in Steve's office as the iCEO himself picks bits of neck vein out from between his teeth, or someone managed to compromise Apple's web servers and upload the G5 specs image as a gag. Either way, it's pretty darn embarrassing for Apple. Really, the only other possibility we can think of is that Apple leaked the image intentionally to throw us all off the track as the Stevenote rapidly approaches, and really, even we aren't paranoid enough to believe that.

(Leans forward dramatically) ...Or are we? Da da da dummmmm!

Oh, yeah-- what with all the wackiness and hilarity surrounding the nature of Apple's flubtabulous leak, we kindasorta forgot to consider the implications of what actually got leaked in the first place. Unless someone's yanking our chains in an extremely nasty and not-at-all-nice manner, it now seems darn near certain that come Monday, Apple's new low-end professional desktop Mac will pack a 1.6 GHz PowerPC 970-- which, according to just about everything we've managed to read about the chip without falling into a deep, deep slumber, may well blow the doors off the dual 1.42 GHz G4s currently perched in Apple's top spot.

This, we imagine, will be a Good Thing™.

Meanwhile, the top of the line looks to house dual 2.0 GHz 970s, which, in addition to absolutely crushing any prior Mac performance-wise, might very well give the zippiest Wintel desktops a run for their money. What's Intel up to now, in terms of clock speed? 3 GHz? So even if we completely ignore the Megahertz Myth (like, you know, pretty much everyone else does), Apple's actually going to ship a processor that's two-thirds the clock speed of Intel's fastest. When was the last time that happened? And the fact that there are two of them in there, well, let's do some Joe Shmoe Math, shall we? Lessee, 2 + 2 = 4, and 4 = 3 + 1, so... Apple's top system must be "one faster" than the Wintel! The company's success in the marketplace is assured!

This is probably also a Good Thing™.

Indeed, we don't pretend to know diddly about the stock market, but just for the heck of it we took a gander at AAPL after the specs leaked. Now, yes, the markets are closed, but it looks to us like AAPL's asking price is $25.96-- nearly seven bucks higher than its closing price of $19.14 yesterday. That very well may mean absolutely squat; for all we know that asking price of $25.96 has been sitting there since hours before the leak happened and means nothing more than Phil Schiller ran out of Goober Grape, but regardless, we're still pretty interested to see what happens to the stock price once the markets open tomorrow. If AAPL skyrockets the way it should (do these things ever work the way they should?), then Apple shareholders may well be in for a windfall that could actually pay for one of those speedy new G5s.

That would definitely be a Good Thing™.

Then again, there's still plenty we don't know. The big unknown right now is price; having a dual 2 GHz G5 in the product line-up isn't going to do anyone much good if Apple gives it a sticker price of $1.2 billion. We're expecting these suckers to carry something of a price premium, given the pent-up demand in the professional market right now (and the long-awaited availability of QuarkXPress for Mac OS X). In fact, we wouldn't be terribly surprised if Apple keeps some low-end G4 configurations around for the budget-conscious professional and education sales, but that's just a hunch.

Note that we also still don't know what this doohickey looks like; we have nothing but faith in the capable hands of Apple's design guru Jonathan Ive, but even geniuses have off-days. Then again, we suspect that the G5s will be so freaking fast that most Mac fans would buy one even if it came in an enclosure made entirely out of rotting liver and shaped like the head of Pat Morita.

On the plus side, not knowing the look or the price is keeping us pretty psyched for Monday's shindig. Hey, who'dathunkit? Not knowing stuff is also a Good Thing™!

Earlier, when we mentioned the likelihood of Steve Jobs chewing clean through the neck of the webgnome responsible for leaking the G5 specs, we suspect that a lot of you took that as a joke. You are correct; we were engaging in a literary device known as "hyperbole," or exaggeration for the sake of emphasis. In reality, we're quite certain that Steve did not, in fact, chew through the hapless lackey's neck; Steve, as we all know, is vegan, and therefore he probably just used a hatchet or something.

No, seriously, we think the guy's amazing and our admiration for him knows no bounds, but he's also one scary SOB, and frankly, if we ever saw him approaching us in a dark alley, we'd probably scream like a grandmother and run away in a manner best befitting Shaggy and Scooby Doo. Seeing as it's the weekend and the issue of whether or not we'll see a Power Mac G5 on Monday is probably no longer weighing very heavily on your minds (cough), we figure this is as good a time as any to pass along what faithful viewer Bill Brown pointed out to us a few days back: an excerpt from Code Name Ginger, Steve Kemper's book about the making of that Segway scooter thingy that's all the rage among rich people who don't like to walk.

You may recall that back before the Segway was unveiled, all the public knew about it was that it was something groundbreaking called "Ginger," and it was widely reported that Jobs was in on the secret and felt that it was significant enough to "architect cities around." What we didn't know (until now, that is) was just how hands-on Steve was when it came to the marketing of the Segway device. Assuming you're okay with the profanity issuing forth from Steve's mouth every six seconds, go read the excerpt for a crystal clear picture of just how scary the man can be-- and keep in mind, that was with people he liked.

Yes, Steve showed up late, refused to hold his questions until after the presentations, interrupted the presenters incessantly, loudly proclaimed that the then-Ginger's design "sucked," insisted that Ginger would fail without a design that "would make you [expletive deleted] your pants," and eventually left after insulting all of New Hampshire. Which is not to say that every single one of his points wasn't remarkably insightful and helpful, but if you take the personality described in Kemper's book and then throw him some web flunky who, with what were probably no more than twelve tragically ill-considered keystrokes, accidentally negated what may have been millions of dollars' worth of security to protect the secret of the Power Mac G5, well, said flunky is probably not going to survive the encounter with all his limbs intact. Anyone know where we can send our condolences?