By the way, Go2Mac also predicts the appearance of a combo-drive PowerBook G4 next month, as well as new colored iBooks. Personally, we're guessing that PowerBooks with internal CD-RW support may come just a wee bit later than the Expo, but as for new colored iBooks, well, heck-- they're already here! At least, according to USA TODAY's iBook review, as pointed out by a befuddled Adam Bezark...

Yes, in an article dated just last Friday and titled "iBook still the standard in laptops," USA TODAY reviewer Bruce Schwartz gives Apple's latest consumer portable three and a half stars out of four. Good news, right? But despite the date and the use of the word "still" in the review's title, this isn't a review of the new iBook; the laptop that Bruce describes bears little similarity to the model that's graced Apple's product line since early May. This iBook's base price is listed as $1599, its enclosure is described as a "latchless, hinged clamshell case," and the specs include a 300 MHz G3 processor and "no built-in DVD or recordable-CD options." And just to make it abundantly clear that something is horribly amiss, the photo accompanying the article depicts a first-generation Tangerine iBook instead of the sleek white jobbie we've all been drooling over for the past six or seven weeks.

Now, the way we see it, one of three things may have happened. The first is that Apple just issued yet another new iBook (whose specifications are eerily identical to the revision B model of early 2000) and told no one but USA TODAY. The second is that, as Adam suggests, USA TODAY has found a way to write reviews through a temporal loop. The third, which is so extraordinarily unlikely that we hesitate even to mention it, is that USA TODAY was asleep at the wheel and accidentally re-ran a review of the rev. B iBook thinking that it was in fact a new review of the current model. A quick check of the Apple Store rules out scenario 1, and the fact that we've been watching this article for days and it still hasn't been fixed proves that scenario 3 is out... so all we can say is, congratulations to USA TODAY for inventing the flux capacitor and breaking the time barrier.

Actually, there is a fourth possibility-- which is that USA TODAY in its infinite wisdom recognized that even an iBook from sixteen months ago at its original price still rates three and a half stars in today's laptop market. C'mon, how can we not give the benefit of the doubt to the publication solely responsible for making bar graphs hip in the '80s?