Well, here we are, less than three weeks away from the next scheduled Stevenote, which officially puts us into the "home stretch" as far as the leaks and rumors go. Expect to see a lot of conflicting and suspicious info flying around the 'net concerning whatever Steve may or may not have up his big, baggy sleeves. The one product that most prognosticators rate as a dead lock, though, is "Mercury," the long-awaited (and, by most counts, long overdue) PowerBook G4. We know, we know-- the current "Pismo" PowerBook was supposed to be a sure thing for last January's Expo, and it was nowhere to be seen. But what are the odds of that happening again? "This time, for sure!"

Now, if you've been waiting for Mercury for as long as we have, you can probably rattle off the rumored specs as easily as you can recite the alphabet: a huge, possibly-wide-aspect-ratio screen, a low-power G4 processor, a funky new enclosure that looks more like Apple's other "pro" products, etc. But Go2Mac is now reporting a new addition to those speculative specs, and it's a doozy: apparently Mercury will break from Apple's long-standing "Live And Die By ATI" tradition and will instead feature a mobile nVIDIA GeForce2 Go chip as its graphics processor.

While we can't say the signs weren't all there, somehow we're still surprised-- and a little skeptical. Sure, Apple's been taking heat for the lackluster performance of ATI graphics chips for ages now. Sure, the blue and white G3 suffered ridiculous instability problems due to notoriously buggy ATI drivers for the included Rage 128 card. Sure, ATI incurred the Wrath of Steve by prematurely issuing a press release that gave details about Apple's then-secret new products just before last summer's Expo. And yes, nVIDIA has both publicly pledged future support for the Macintosh platform and inadvertently revealed some tantalizing hints of things to come by having an Apple OEM directory on its web site. But still, deep down inside, we're having a really tough time accepting the possibility that Apple may finally have gotten the ATI monkey off its back.

If it's true, though, then we at AtAT welcome the move. Everything we've heard about the GeForce chipsets has been phenomenal, and while we love our Pismo to pieces, trying to play Deus Ex on it is an exercise in frustration. And here's hoping that this is just the beginning, and the nVIDIA line spreads to the rest of Apple's products over the course of the next year. Of course, there's no guarantee that nVIDIA's Mac drivers are going to be any less troublesome than ATI's, but hey-- at least it's a change of pace.