Seeing as it's a relatively quiet Friday, let's revisit this whole "no new hardware" controversy again for a second. First of all, the latest development is that, as we predicted yesterday, Apple has indeed ended its "Burning Desires" promotion ten days ahead of schedule; sometime yesterday afternoon, the promo page magically transformed to report an August 24th end date instead of the originally listed September 3rd. That lends a whole lot of credence to Wednesday's premonition that PowerBook prices are going to fall off a cliff tomorrow. (You've probably noticed by now that after our Wednesday episode, everybody on the planet has been reporting $400-500 price drops on TiBooks starting tomorrow-- including Apple. What can we say? We're trendsetters.)

So the price drops are now official. Now, we find it singularly unlikely that Apple would slash prices so drastically unless it were trying to flush the channel as titanium-free as possible in preparation for a couple of new configurations. And yes, Steve did clearly state that there would be no new hardware products launched at the Apple Expo in Paris at the end of next month, but a revised PowerBook isn't exactly a "new hardware product," so he might just be playing with semantics. Regardless, as far as promises of no new hardware in Paris go, faithful viewer Susanna pointed out a CNET article in which it's noted that an official Apple representative "would not say whether the same holds true for Apple Vice President Phil Schiller, who is giving a keynote address at Seybold Seminars" the day before-- with Steve live via satellite.

And notice how Apple's is the only Seybold keynote listed as a "SPECIAL KEYNOTE"? We're pretty sure that isn't referring to a transatlantic Phil-n'-Steve duet of "I Got You Babe." (In case you're wondering, Phil sings the Cher part.) We're just guessing at this point, but we can certainly imagine Apple making a big push to persuade the Seybold crowd that the new, even-faster PowerBook G4 is everything they'd ever want in a production powerhouse on the go. Dare we dream of a PowerBook demo of Final Cut Pro for Mac OS X 10.1? Or maybe a Photoshop "bake-off" between the new high-end PowerBook and a Wintel desktop system? Whatever. In any case, if a revised PowerBook doesn't figure significantly at both Seybold and the Apple Expo, we're going to be more than a little surprised. Now if only that LCD iMac could crawl its way out the door...