You waited for over a year. You read rumors about wireless Internet access, sub-$1000 prices, instant-on, an eight-hour battery life, pen-based handwriting input, Mac OS Lite, and a gazillion other features that may or may not have made it into the final product in some form or another. You spent many a sleepless night trying to reconcile all the rumors and force them together into a viable, cost-effective consumer portable. And now that it's finally been announced, you (and Mac mavens everywhere) feel strangely empty; you're searching for the Next Big Thing™ from Apple to fill the gaping hole left in your speculator's soul by the arrival of the iBook. Fear not; there's still the next-generation iMac, code-named "Kihei"-- and it invites the same kind of guessing games as the iBook did: what'll it be, and when will we see it?

First of all, the "what": if you're brushing off a new iMac as boring (sacrilege!), it's important to note that Kihei isn't just a new iMac revision-- it's a whole new beast. Until now, all we've seen in terms of iMac changes are minor things like processor speed bumps, graphics improvements, disk size increases, etc. But Kihei is more than that; it's rumored to use an entirely new enclosure, possibly with a slightly bigger screen and a pull-out motherboard architecture that should make upgrading Kihei RAM a snap (as opposed to the bizarre and arcane ritual that's necessary now). There's also a lot of talk that Kihei will include FireWire and possibly a DVD-ROM drive plus DVD video hardware. NoBeige has a pretty hefty compendium of rumored Kihei specs, including an "artist's conception" of what it might look like.

Now, recently, the rumors we've been hearing most all have to do with "when." Originally some people figured on a Macworld Expo introduction, but obviously that didn't happen-- allegedly because Apple needed to enlist the help of Kihei engineers to get the iBook done in time. So now there are three "most probable" time frames for a Kihei introduction. First, there's August 15th, which is the iMac's first birthday; Mac the Knife is currently touting this as Kihei's big "hello again (again)." But we're hearing conflicting info from those nefarious "unnamed Apple sources" lurking in the shadows. Some of them are saying "Seybold," which is at the end of the month, which seems more likely just because it's still almost a month away, but Seybold isn't exactly the greatest event at which to unveil a consumer product. Other Apple sources claim that, in fact, there will be no new iMac this quarter at all, since the current ones are still selling so well; that puts Kihei's introduction no earlier than October. Time to start up an office pool!