Despite the discontinuance of most of Apple's Powerbook lineup this weekend, the new Wall Street and Main Street lines (and the speed-bumped 2400, code-named Mighty Cat) failed to materialize today. That's not too surprising, since Steve Jobs is giving his much-ballyhooed Seybold Keynote address tomorrow morning, and what better time to introduce nifty new hardware? (We're going to try like the dickens to listen to the webcast, but it seems unlikely that we'll be lucky enough to get through...) In the meantime, though, there's a huge gap in Apple's Powerbook offerings. True, there are plenty of these newly-discontinued models in the channel waiting to be snapped up, but officially, there's been a day's dearth of heavy-duty laptops in Apple's lineup. How can Apple ever make up for such a heinous omission?

By delivering Wall Street, that's how. The latest performance notes from O'Grady's PowerPage are too incredible to believe (and you know we're not the overly-skeptical type). The O'Grady's team took the fastest Mac currently available (the 266 MHz G3), clock-chipped it to 292 MHz, and tweaked its bus to 83 MHz before adding a high-end ultra-wide SCSI card and a 10K RPM drive. This "úber-desktop" MacBenched an amazing 1025 on the CPU test, over twice as fast as our own 200 MHz 604e / 1 MB L2 system. What does this have to do with Wall Street? Turns out that the 250 MHz Wall Street is an astounding 33% faster than this speedy desktop. (Jaw drops to the floor with a "clang," tongue unrolls like a carpet, steam shoots from ears.)

We're basing this entirely on O'Grady's say-so, and hopefully the numbers on the released shipping systems will confirm their results. So, starting tomorrow (we hope), Apple's fastest Mac will be a Powerbook: sign of the Apocalypse, or what?

Actually, though, we can't be sure that Wall Street will really be the fastest shipping Mac-- at least, not now that Apple's added a new "workstation-class" Powermac G3 to its price list. According to MacNN, the new minitower showed up over the weekend, sporting a 300 MHz G3 processor, a full megabyte of backside L2 cache, 128 MB of RAM, two 4 GB drives connected to an ultra-wide SCSI card, a 24x CD-ROM drive, an ix3D Ultimate Rez 8 MB graphics card, and built-in 10/100 Ethernet. If you've got the cash, you can grab a whole lot of Mac for $4899.

Last we checked this new MegaMac hadn't yet shown up at the Apple Store, probably because Steve Jobs plans to unveil it officially at Seybold tomorrow. (It is, after all, a content creator's dream.) Still, various sources confirm that it is on the official price list, and we expect to see it show up online tomorrow after the big speech.

The only thing that worries us is that if the G3 300 showed up on price lists over the weekend in preparation for the big unveiling tomorrow, does the fact that Wall Street and Main Street did not appear imply that they won't be available this week after all? If so, then Apple's going to have a big gap in its Powerbook line for longer than might be advisable...

Okay, so between Wall Street and the G3 300, Apple's got the high end covered. Will they continue to ignore the low end, which is the fastest-growing market for personal computers? Yes, there's the NC project, which Apple has yet to formally acknowledge. There's also this new thingy people are calling the AMP, which may or may not be a consumer-level entertainment device for families who don't want to buy "real" computers-- but Apple's even less likely to talk about that anytime soon. No, the biggest hope for Apple's chances in the home market is Artemis, the Power Macintosh G3 Home, which still hasn't been officially announced, but may ship as early as next month.

No one's really been concerned about Artemis' butt-kicking specs; a 200 MHz G3, 32 MB of RAM, a 2 GB hard disk, a 24x CD-ROM, and 3 PCI slots all integrated with a 15" monitor for $999 sounds like a sure winner. One of the few things that could keep it from succeeding, however, was its butt-ugly case. It's since been redesigned at least a couple of times, and Reality has what finally appears to be an actual photograph of the case to be used long-awaited consumer G3 system. (It's not exactly right, apparently, as the final case is said to be rounder, but it's pretty darn close.)

We're glad to see that it's a pretty clean design; in fact, it reminds us a lot of the Color Classic case, scaled up to accept a 15" display and a CD-ROM drive. Our European readers will be glad to notice the tilt-and-swivel base underneath, which is a requirement for all displays sold in Europe, we're told. And the functionality of the design is excellent-- the front lower panel slides out like a desk drawer, allowing easy access to the machine's guts without having to crawl around behind the desk. Kudos to the designers-- one of these will look great in our kitchen.