Man, what a bummer way to wind up a week: with a heaping helping of Rumor Smackdown. While we still haven't heard anything that contradicts our last mysterious tip-off that speedy new PowerBooks are slated to surface before the month is up (thank heaven!), faithful viewer Zorro informs us that the recently-reported September 13th target date for a Mac OS X 10.1 release is woefully overoptimistic. Instead, given the current state of development, an introduction at the Apple Expo in Paris on the 26th is far more likely. While that doesn't come as any particular surprise, it is mildly disappointing for those of us who were hoping that the shipping-next-week prediction over at Mac OS Rumors would let us experience Puma a couple of weeks early. (And no, the fact that the latest MacConnection catalog says that 10.1 is "now shipping" doesn't make it so.)

Worse yet, though, for those of you who blithely ignored Uncle Steve's official declaration that there would be no "new hardware products" launched in Paris this year, now you've got even less of a reason to expect a surprise introduction of those long-rumored rack-mount servers that Apple is supposedly kicking around in its secret underground labs. See, some people took the fact that Apple's Power Mac G4 Servers did notget updated with the advent of the new Quicksilver Power Macs a couple of months ago as a hint that something "entirely other" in the server arena was imminent. And it was something of a reasonable assumption, when you think about it; Apple's servers have long been standard current Power Macs with additional software, RAM, and storage. The company's two-month delay in migrating its servers to the new Quicksilver chassis and processor specs certainly implied that some real servers might be just around the corner.

Sadly, though, the prospects of racklicious new servers debuting this month just pretty much dwindled to zero. As noted by The Register, Apple has finally quietly updated its Power Mac G4 Server-- and it's just an entry-level Quicksilver G4/733 with 256 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and a bundled copy of Mac OS X Server. Not that we'd set fire to one if it magically appeared on our doorstep one evening, of course, but it's definitely not the "real" server that some people have been waiting for-- and the manner in which Apple introduced this new configuration completely under the radar isn't exactly conducive to hoopla and merriment, which, at the end of the day, is pretty much all we're interested in, anyway.

So, that's one more piece of rumored Apple gear that likely won't be dropping jaws at either of the company's end-of-September events. At this point we're resigned to seeing the new PowerBook and nothing else-- not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. But here's hoping we're not wrong about the PowerBook, because otherwise we're going to fall into a hardware-deprivation coma until the mythical LCD iMac finally materializes.