The rumors continue-- horrible, ghastly rumors of experiments with anabolic steroids and gene-splicing technology in Apple's underground labs. Remember back when everyone thought the consumer portable was going to be a subnotebook, weighing less than five pounds? What we got, of course, was the iBook-- a behemoth that's both larger and heavier than even Apple's professional PowerBook G3. What most people don't realize is that the iBook was a subnotebook at one time in its development-- before the steroid treatments and induced mutation, that is. Someone high up at Apple firmly believes that bigger is better, and the through-the-roof iBook sales numbers are only reinforcing that belief.

Which means that the rumored Macworld Expo debut of a bigger iMac in a couple of weeks is becoming increasingly likely. According to Apple Insider, the "P7A" won't be ready to ship until February at the earliest, but a few pre-production models have already broken their restraints and emerged from Apple's labs-- big, hulking versions of the current iMac DV Special Edition, complete with the long-awaited 17-inch screen. And the treatments had another interesting side effect, as well: P7A's medical chart shows its G3 processor has been boosted to 500 MHz. Other than that, P7A is just like today's Graphite iMac DV SE-- only bigger, stronger, and faster.

Now, if this indeed turns out to be true, we really have to wonder just how many G4 sales Apple would cannibalize. Your AtAT staff, in particular, has a hard time justifying the purchase of a Power Mac G4 when the P7A has just about everything we need: a 17-inch screen, USB and FireWire, a RAM ceiling much higher than we need, and a processor that beats the living daylights out of our current 200 MHz 604e workhorse. About the only thing we'd miss would be some PCI slots, but we're more than willing to give those up provided the P7A represents a significant price savings. We guess we'll know in a couple of weeks whether P7A is real, or just more Apple misinformation concocted to keep us on our toes.