Heads up-- there's less than two weeks left until Seybold and its attendant action-packed Steve Jobs keynote address. And do you suppose that Steve's going to get up in front of thousands of members of Apple's lucrative "content creation" market without introducing something big, and probably expensive? He'd be more likely to breakdance naked onstage than to pass up a golden opportunity to get the big-budget graphics crowd foaming at the mouth over some new "gotta have it" Mac gear. (By the way, did anyone else just go to a scary visual place just then?)

But here's the problem; it's only been a month since Macworld Expo, when Steve trotted out the dual-processor, gigabit-Ethernet Power Mac G4 and the itty-bitty Cube. Only the most insanely optimistic, medication-skipping Mac fans could even imagine that Apple's professional desktop systems are already ripe for an upgrade-- and with the G4 still stuck at 500 MHz, what would Steve do, throw a third G4 in there just for fun? So that leaves only one candidate for a revision: the PowerBook, whose current incarnation is six months old. Granted, six months isn't a terribly long life cycle where Apple's products are concerned, but it's not unheard of, either. So personally, we wouldn't be all that surprised if Steve trotted out PowerBook speed bumps/RAM boosts/disk boosts/price reductions.

One thing we don't expect to see, though, is an honest-to-goodness, supercomputer-to-go PowerBook G4. Despite what Mac OS Rumors says about "400-500 MHz 'Nitro' reduced-power/temperature G4 processors" making their way into Apple's portable product line-up in a couple of weeks, we just can't see it. Maybe you can chalk it up to victim's pessimism brought on by constant disappointments from Motorola, but we're not expecting a laptop-friendly G4 until much later this year-- though, of course, pleasant surprises are always welcome. And what this? Faithful viewer Rick Frank spotted a reference to a PowerBook G4 in a product description listed over at MacMall. It's probably just a simple mistake, but miracles have been known to happen-- even a few that don't involve the appearance of Elvis in a tortilla. (Incidentally, the PowerBook Zone has an excellent article enumerating the various and sundry reasons why such a major PowerBook overhaul doesn't stand much of a chance of showing up at Seybold.)

The other (remote) possibility, though, is that Steve will surprise everyone by filling in the mysterious sixth slot in Apple's revised product grid. The Cube is targeted at people who want G4 power in a super-stylish package but don't need all the expandibility of a full-fledged Power Mac. Based on that, we can imagine that Apple might finally address the segment of its portable market that's been clamoring for a thin-and-light subnotebook ever since the 2400 went the way of all silicon. At one point Steve himself had mentioned publicly that Apple was working on an "executive" laptop: something small and stylish that's more suited to the business traveler who wants to write memos and check email on the road, without having to lug around a portable video production studio. So perhaps a laptop analogous to the Cube is gearing up for Seybold-- though the nude breakdancing scenario doesn't sound all that less likely. Who's got the Vegas odds?