Well, stretch out our sweater sleeves and call us Flappy-- apparently some men with pineapples are trustworthy after all! On Friday we made a throwaway reference to a "wildly unconfirmed" rumor of new bigger-disk iPods coming "as early as Monday," and sure enough, here it is and here they are: faithful viewer mrmgraphics tipped us off to pineapple-man's uncanny accuracy earlier today. Go figure. Man, the Dole people must be ecstatic.

According to Apple's press release, it seems that the low-end model is sticking fast at 10 GB for $299, but the midrange unit just got a 5 GB boost to 20 GB at its same $399 price, while the $499 top-of-the-liner is 10 GB roomier at a whopping 40 GB. By Apple's count, that's 10,000 songs in your pocket, a.k.a. "play music for a solid month straight and never hear the same song twice." Sorta makes your local radio station's "No Repeat Workday" look pretty lame, doesn't it? We're especially impressed that these storage boosts are the equivalent of Apple somehow stuffing one or two original $399 iPods completely inside the new models for free-- and without the Hulk-style tattered purple pants syndrome. We'll never doubt the veracity of tuxedo-clad mutterers bearing the fruit of the ananas comosus again.

Indeed, we only wish that we'd have listened to the guy when he also mentioned "an iMac speed bump of some proportion" ("no, really, he did-- honest!" we say; "uh-huh, suuuure he did," you say); at the time we wrote it off as just more pineapple-nut ravings, especially since we thought the rumored new iMacs were supposedly going to use the PPC7457 G4 processor, a shipment of which Motorola has allegedly owed Apple since mid-May-- you know, the same missing chips that have had us all hanging in PowerBook limbo for the past three centuries. And yet, as faithful viewer Troy Phillips points out, there is indeed another Apple press release touting "significant enhancements" to the iMac line.

So here's what's new in today's iMac: faster processors (1 GHz or 1.25 GHz G4); more and faster memory (256 MB of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM); faster graphics (nVIDIA GeForce4 MX in the 15-inch model, GeForce FX 5200 in the 17-incher); faster ports (well, at least for USB, which is now 2.0-- FireWire's still "vanilla," not FireWire 800); faster wireless (AirPort Extreme-ready); and faster virtual blood on concrete (free copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4). Whether or not you consider all that significant or just "significant" depends largely on your perspective, but to us it looks like a decent batch o' briskness to keep the LCD iMac hep and groovy here in the latter half of 2003.

So enjoy the new hardware, and we promise: if we see a scraggly guy inappropriately caressing a cantaloupe the next time we're down at the bus terminal, we'll be sure to ask him about G5 Xserves. From a safe distance, of course.

So at this point you may well be wondering whether Apple is just mocking us all; after all, here we are on a Monday chock-full of updated hardware announcements, and yet refreshed PowerBooks are nowhere to be seen. Seriously, was anyone out there asking for a 40 GB iPod? Were there any death threats in play over Apple's continued inability to grant its customers the inalienable human right to carry ten thousand songs in one's pocket (nine thousand, if one of them's "Freebird")? Not as far as we know. And yet, legions of starving PowerBook fanatics with foam-flecked lips and wild eyes just got stepped on yet again. When will the abuse end?

Answer: soon. Real soon. Lack of PowerBooks aside, today's batch of fresh-from-the-oven hardware updates was actually good news from a PowerBook perspective. Well, okay, maybe not as good as actually getting the freakin' PowerBooks, but good nonetheless, because whereas the high-end PowerBook tops out at 1 GHz, the iMac now reaches 1.25 GHz. Okay, yeah, that's kind of painful to consider, but keep in mind the Sixth Commandment: "Thou shalt not runneth consumer products at higher clock speeds than professional gear." (Okay, maybe it's not actually a commandment. But we're pretty sure it's in the Bible somewhere. Near the back, probably.) We're not saying that the new iMacs are actually faster than the current PowerBooks; they might be, but cache issues, bus speeds, and all that jazz come into play. Regardless, the important thing is that the iMacs look faster because of the GHz discrepancy, and that's a big marketing no-no.

"Yeah, and the iMacs probably use that new PPC7457 G4 chip that's been holding up the PowerBooks, right? So new iMacs means the chips are finally here!" Well, uh, no. As far as we can tell by scoping out the tech specs, the new iMacs are using the very 7455 that is apparently oh-so-unsuitable for use in a portable that isn't hooked up to a diesel generator and a heat sink the size of Montana. But that's not to say that the 7457 isn't coming any day now; MacBidouille has rumors of a 7457 breakthrough just last week ("hey, everybody, Motorola found the 'on' switch!"), with "30,000 1.25 GHz certified CPUs and 20,000 1.3 GHz ones" rolling off the lines. We're just guessing, here, but we bet Apple could launch a 1.3 GHz PowerBook line-up with chips for twenty thousand units in the first production run, right?

Plus, there's the whole Wow Factor; don't forget, Steve's got a keynote to deliver next week, and obviously his big surprise isn't going to be new iPods or faster iMacs. Suddenly the odds of a Paris PowerBook Extravaganza are starting to look pretty darn good. But actually, now that we think about it, these long-awaited speed-bumped PowerBooks are really no bigger an update than the refreshed iMacs, which only ranked a press release, not Stevenote status. So could new PowerBooks really make the cut for a Stevetacular surprise? Maybe Apple's counting on pent-up demand to lend the announcement some drama. Or maybe the new PowerBooks are going to be packing something that no one's yet expecting, like fuel cell technology or an integrated trouser press. Or, dare we say, a G5?

Actually, since laptop-friendly G5s won't surface until 2004 at the earliest, no, we don't dare. But we're liking the trouser press idea. Our jeans are all wrinkly.

We've got another iTunes Music Store sales bulletin, and it's about time! Remember back in the iTMS's infancy when Apple announced totals every twenty minutes keeping us all up to date on how many songs it had sold so far? Well, apparently the novelty's worn off, because it's been ages since we've had a proper press release with a sales total. Thankfully, that dry spell has come to an end, as Apple boogies down to celebrate the Big One-Oh... Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh-Oh. No, we're not channeling early-'80s Billy Idol or quoting the lyrical genius of Sir Justin Timberlake; we're trying to tell you that the iTMS recently sold its ten millionth song. Unlike "Paradise Hotel" castoffs, here's a mess of zeroes we can really appreciate.

Apple's third press release of the day indicates that the ten millionth song purchased was "Complicated" by Avril Lavigne, and it was bought at 11:34 PM Pacific time last Wednesday. So, uh, who was it? Was it you? C'mon, fess up-- it was you, wasn't it?

Cooooool. Hey, congratulations!

So we'd do the math, but Apple beat us to it: ten million songs sold in just over four months online breaks down to roughly half a million songs per week on average, which means that the sales slowdown after the first big rush of Mac users "kicking the tires" wasn't nearly as bad as we'd feared. You may recall that Apple sold a million songs in its first week, and its second million in the following nine days; settling into a million roughly every fifteen days sounds just spiffy to us, especially since the major labels reportedly had hoped-- not necessarily expected, but hoped-- that the iTMS would sell a million songs in its first month, and now Apple appears to be sustaining a rate twice that zippy. Kudos to Apple for pulling this off. We can't wait to see the numbers once the Windows version ships.

Speaking of Windows, whatever happened to BuyMusic.com? It's still around, apparently, but we're just wondering when we'll see all of its press releases; you know, ones trumpeting its millions of sales and astounding greater-than-30% customer satisfaction rate. Or is it possible that there are no press releases because Scott Blum's ambitious exercise in simultaneous plagiarism, suckification, and insulting that which it copies poorly in the first place simply isn't emptying Windows users' wallets the way Apple copycats always expect them to? We can't help but notice that the BuyMusic $40 million ad blitz vanished from screens so fast you'd think it was Gigli. But we're sure Scott'll keep us posted on the industry-leading success of his little venture any day now...