Hey, if Apple's new promotion indicates that there won't be a new PowerBook G4 at next month's Stevenote, then what does Fearless Leader have up his sleeve? Forget about a new iBook; the current model's barely been shipping for a month yet. A new Cube? Sorry, Charlie; gorgeous though it may be, we have a strong feeling that Steve's eight-inch brain-in-a-box is about to vanish quietly, with scarcely a mention of its passing. (The other possibility is a modest upgrade of features in the same ageless enclosure, but we're not holding our breath.) That leaves Power Macs and iMacs.

There's some debate among the professional Expo prognosticators whether or not the Power Macs will be revised next month (personally, we're guessing at an across-the-line speed bump, some minor architectural improvements, and more dual-processor options). However, everyone with a pulse and two brain cells to rub together seems to be expecting new iMacs to join Steve onstage. After all, the product line is clearly overdue for a serious rewrite, and we're not talking about slapping some funky new patterns onto the same old enclosure in hopes of extracting a few more bucks from the terminally fashion-conscious. Most speculation revolves around an iMac with an LCD display that's optimized to run (and to showcase) Mac OS X. So an Expo iMac intro is a given, right?

Not so fast, Slim-- at least one entity is pondering the notion that the new iMac may not make its debut at the Javits Center in a month after all. But before you go ballistic about the iMac being late, we should clarify: Go2Mac actually thinks that it might in fact be early. Given Apple's recent openness to non-Expo product introductions (witness last month's iBook press event, for instance), Go2Mac figures that the new iMac may actually strut its stuff during Steve's other imminent keynote-- at the education-focused NECC 2001 show in Chicago in a mere ten days' time. Sure, Apple's been pushing the iBook as the ideal education unit, but the iMac still might be well-suited for a NECC unveiling.

Then again, since we've already got a pretty hefty hint that the new PowerBook will be introduced in September, we really doubt that Apple would let as important an event as this Macworld Expo pass without a fairly serious hardware intro-- and speed-bumped Power Macs don't quite qualify. If we had to slap down a Benjamin on the new iMac's intro date, we'd still pick July 18th; this Expo is Mac OS X's "coming-out party," and Apple needs something huge to draw the press. What's huger (figuratively speaking, of course) than the first completely all-new iMac since 1998? But we'll be keeping a close eye on NECC 2001, just in case...