Well, that was a bit of a surprise, yeah? No Pismo in sight-- in fact, you may have noticed that Uncle Steve was very careful to avoid mentioning PowerBooks at all throughout his entire keynote. Oh, sure, there was the little snippet about Apple's share of the overall laptop market, but nothing specific to PowerBooks themselves. In fact, the only hint we got about Pismo came when Steve was talking about AirPort and let slip that "all Apple systems are now AirPort-ready." Uhhhh, all except the PowerBook, right, Steve? Unless you've got a new one to show us, that is...

So Pismo was MIA, much to everyone's shock, but at least this means we can indulge our pipe dream about a light-up PowerBook keyboard for a few more weeks. Apparently AppleInsider was right when they reported that Pismo had fallen way behind schedule. In fact, there was no new hardware sharing the stage with Steve; Pismo was considered a sure thing, but plenty of people were also expecting faster G4s, multiprocessor G4s, and possibly even a 17" iMac. Instead it was a software-only kind of day-- though Steve was no less enthralling because of it. Still, we're a bit wobbly after having sat through an entire Stevenote (and a marathon one at that!) without a single "bake-off" showing off the Mac's speed when compared to a high-end Wintel system. Perhaps we'll go back and watch some older keynotes just to restore our bake-off balance. (By the way, if you missed this latest keynote, you can still see it via the miracle of QuickTime 4's streaming video-on-demand.)

Now, for those of you on pins and needles over this whole Pismo thing, fret not-- the current "bronze" PowerBook is definitely end-of-lifed; we seem to recall several reports that CompUSA has it marked as such in their system, and while we wouldn't necessarily trust CompUSA any farther than we could comfortably spit a rat, every indication is that Apple's ready for Pismo-- it's just that Pismo isn't quite ready for Apple. Let's see, now... there's a Macworld Expo in Tokyo next month, right? Well, as the Next Big Apple Event, we suppose that's a reasonable venue for Pismo's debut, though we'd expect a U.S. unveiling to be more likely. Guess we'll be seeing a "Media Event" sometime soon-- unless, of course, Pismo is much further behind than people think. Remember Wall Street? The original PowerBook G3 Series missed event after event before finally showing up in May of 1998 (and being completely eclipsed by the iMac). So let's just say we're used to this kind of thing, and while we expect Pismo within a few short weeks, we aren't going to be overly surprised if it doesn't surface until May.