Pop quiz! Please name the next two numbers in the following sequence: 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, _, _. If you answered "1" and "1," congratulations! You possess the pattern-recognition ability to predict the general look and color scheme of Apple's upcoming product lines. If you answered "3" and "7," you're sadly in need of a brain tune-up. Report to your local neurosurgeon for maintenance work. (If you answered "Volvo" and "chicken," you're too far gone; you've trashed this brain and should probably replace it outright. Try eBay.)

Our point is this: Apple has released two entirely new chassis designs since the Power Mac G4 Cube first limped onto store shelves last summer with its award-winning compactness, clean lines, rounded right angles, and distinctly silvery-metallic look. The first was the PowerBook G4, with which revision Apple ditched the black plastics and swoopy curves of the previous three PowerBooks and moved to an aesthetic featuring compactness, clean lines, rounded right angles, and a distinctly silvery-metallic look. The second is the new iBook; gone are the colored plastics and swoopy curves of the original design, replaced instead with compactness, clean lines, rounded right angles, and a distinctly whitish-silvery look. Getting the picture?

Now, before you start going on about Flower Power and Blue Dalmatian iMacs, please keep in mind that the iMac is still using fundamentally the same hardware design it's had since 1999; similarly, the faster Power Macs introduced in January are sporting a chassis virtually unchanged since the original blue-and-white G3s. So it's no wonder those products are currently the odd ducks in the line-up-- but as faithful viewer newwavedave points out, if Mac OS Rumors is correct, it won't be long before those two products at least partially inherit the Cube Aesthetic that's all the rage in Apple's design labs this season.

Reportedly the next-generation iMacs that most of us are expecting this summer feature a "silver/white theme... very similar in color to the present iBooks." And after one last hurrah in the form of a minor Power Mac revision within the next couple of months, that product's existing chassis design will be replaced with a "dramatic new stylized enclosure." Surprisingly enough, early versions of that enclosure eschew the "bulging polycarbonate plastic panels" and "gentle curves" of the current design, instead embracing a "stamped aluminum frame" with a nearly-square geometry and "rounded" corners and edges. Even if these aluminum Power Macs are indeed anodized blue or green as MOSR suggests, the metallic theme remains. (We're expecting anodized PowerBooks by then, anyway.)

So that's the scoop, kids; it looks like Apple's hooked on this whole straight-lines-and-metal kick for the foreseeable future. Adjust your wardrobes accordingly, but don't go too nuts-- for all we know, this time next year Apple may be big into wood grain and burlap.