Hmmm, maybe we're not nearly as on top of things as we thought we were. After all, Robert Morgan has just posted an RFI Report over at MacWEEK vehemently denying that Apple would be shipping any G4-based Macs at next month's Macworld Expo. In addition, he's adamant that Apple also won't start shipping the P1 consumer portable or the new turbo-charged iMac until well after the early January festivities. Morgan seems to think that these rumors may actually be part of a deliberate misinformation campaign on Apple's part, intended to help them plug some of the leaks in the Great Wall of Cupertino.

Now, what took us by surprise about the whole situation wasn't that RFI is contradicting claims that Apple would ship all this cool new stuff next month; rather, what surprised us was that anyone had thought otherwise. After all, production-level G4 processors are barely expected to have poked their heads out of their burrows by next month, we thought, and everything we've heard indicates that they won't find their way into Macs before at least the middle of next year. The spruced-up iMac, meanwhile, seems likely to make an appearance sometime between February and May, but given Apple's big push to sell as many current iMacs as possible during the holiday season, we just can't imagine that Apple would leap out of the bushes five days after New Year's and yell "Surprise! New iMacs! Don't you wish you had waited? Suckers!" Wouldn't be prudent. And as for the P1, about the most we thought anyone was expecting at the Expo was a product unveiling, but certainly not an announcement that the portables were actually available for purchase.

And yet there was the prediction, right in front of our faces, right at the top of a recent Don Crabb article in MacCentral. Yes, we had read it. In fact, we had even referred to it in yesterday's episode, in which we discussed Apple's impending holiday shutdown. Somehow we just completely spaced on the news up top that Apple would be shipping all this cool gear next month; we'd like to think that our minds automatically filtered out the absurdity, but the truth of the matter is, we're probably just getting absent-minded in our old age. Chalk it up to impending birthdays coupled with holiday stress. (By the way, if Apple does ship this stuff next month, we're going to amass a pretty hefty post-holiday credit card bill-- but we're spending with impunity anyway, because we figure we have a better chance of winning the lottery than of having to budget for a G4 in January.)