Can you believe it? Here we are, less than twenty-four hours away from His Royal Steveness's next address to his loyal subjects at Seybold, and the excitement level in the Mac community has reached a fever pitch-- if by "fever pitch" you're referring to lethargy, lack of appetite, and teetering on the brink of death. Whereas "Cube Frenzy" gripped the world prior to last month's Expo keynote, this time around no one seems all that juiced. And now that "Survivor" is finally over we can't even blame that as a distraction. So what's going on?

Well, simply put, nothing. Or, as ZDNet columnist Matthew Rothenberg puts it: "Nothing. Nada. Zip. Move along; there's nothing to see here." In his latest piece (sure to spur the "Rothenberg Was Mac the Knife" conspiracy theorists to foaming new heights, as Matt the Rothenberg veers dangerously close to dinnerware-style prose while dropping a couple of obscure links and references just to keep us guessing), he summarizes the points we've already made here before: that Seybold is a professional conference; that Apple just revamped the pro desktop line at the Expo; that by most accounts, the next PowerBook isn't quite ready yet; that Apple's engineers are unlikely to ship the Mac OS X public beta this far in advance of the "end of summer" deadline; and that, consequently, Seybold will be pretty much a non-event for the Apple drama fiend.

More to the point, Apple's decision not to webcast the keynote hints that nothing big is brewing for tomorrow's State of the Apple address-- and if you need still more evidence that Steve isn't going to floor us all with a PowerBook G4, a surprise 1.0 version of Mac OS X ("We discovered the beta is bug-free, so here ya go!"), or a six-slot nitro-burning Funny Mac with dual carbs, fuzzy dice, and flame detailing on the sides, perhaps you'll take Apple's own word for it: reportedly the company's PR flunkies are doing everything they can to quell expectations of major new product announcements tomorrow. One rep lays it bare: "This will basically be a reiteration of our product messaging [from July's] Macworld New York and just sort of skewing that as it relates to the creative space. We feel like the majority of our announcements were made a couple of months ago."

So there you have it: weep not for the Case of the Missing Webcast, since apart from Steve's boyish charm, you won't be missing much anyway. Unless, of course, Apple doth protest too much. We don't have too much trouble envisioning a scenario in which Steve, frustrated by the tainting of his Expo surprises by such factors as Cube leaks and ATI's premature revelations, decided to ensure a jaw-dropping keynote chock full o' shockers by sending his minions forth to repeat "there's nothing going on" to anyone who would listen. Cancelling the webcast may simply have been the masterstroke in a cunning plan to keep the masses in the dark. All we can say is, if tomorrow's keynote bears serious Mac fruit, we won't fall for that trick again.