Welp, it's the last weekday before the Big Day, and in light of the fact that a lot of people had their Stevenote prognosticative radar knocked severely out of whack by that goofy iWalk hoax, we figured we should do a last chance wrap-up of the various bits and pieces expected to accompany Steve onstage come Monday. You know, just for giggles... because we're pretty sure that whatever we predict, we're going to get blindsided by something unexpected. It is simply the Way of Steve, and should be accepted as such.

First, the easy stuff: there will be a new iMac, largely in part because Mr. Jobs realizes that if he sits on that flat-panel consumer desktop any longer, the crowd will rend him limb from limb, Reality Distortion Field notwithstanding. For what it's worth, faithful viewer Andrew notes that MacMinute has "confirmed" that the LCD iMac will boast a 15-inch screen, a G3 running at "up to 750 MHz," and an $1800 sticker price; there will allegedly be CRT-based "classic" iMacs sticking around as well to round out the lower end of the price spectrum. Think Secret concurs, adding that the older iMacs will gain new colors, presumably as a booby prize to consumers who can't scrape together the cash for the LCD model. As for us, we have no divine insight on this short of the very general notion that a flat-panel iMac will debut, so we're passing on these details on a strictly as-is basis.

A couple of weeks ago a cosmically-aware lava lamp told us that iPhoto would make an appearance at this event, and both MacMinute and Think Secret apparently now agree. We'd like to add that Adobe's aura is looking very dark right about now, indicating that while the company will indeed ship a handful of Mac OS X-native applications next week (not Photoshop, unfortunately), those guys will be smiling through gritted teeth, because they are not happy about this whole iPhoto thing. Oooo, tense. While we obviously wish the best for both companies, the soap opera-producing side of us can't help but hope that Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen takes a swing at Steve onstage, only to be tackled and dragged away screaming by security. So we're hopeless romantics; sue us.

One thing the lava lamp never revealed was an iBook update, but both MacMinute and Think Secret think we'll see a speed bump and maybe some color choices. Personally, we'd think that current iBooks would have been end-of-lifed by now if that sort of thing were going to happen, and as far as we know, they haven't been; however, we've never known MacMinute to be wrong about this sort of thing, whereas you really can't trust fortune-telling lava lamps any farther than you can comfortably spit them these days. So we'll toss those folks the benefit of the doubt, here, and stick new iBooks in the "probably" category, despite our own gut feeling on the matter.

Something that MacMinute doesn't mention is a new set of Power Macs; we're not sure if we should read anything into that. Think Secret is waffling, stating that they "do not have enough confidence to confirm there will be a 1 GHz G4 announcement." That runs decidedly counter to the wisdom imparted by the lava lamp, but that was a couple of weeks ago, and things change. There's also that little matter of a lava lamp being primarily a piece of retro kitsch, and not commonly used as a means of divining the future, but hey, it all seemed so clear at the time. Let's just say that if we don't see the low end of the G4 spectrum rise to at least 933 MHz come Monday, we're going to be very disappointed in the predictive abilities of globs of wax suspended in mystery liquid. (Unless the G4 bump comes, say, later in the month instead. Then we'll reconsider.)

So what's left? Our lava-filled link to the Powers That Be hinted that Mac OS X might become Apple's default booting operating system next week, though no one else seems to think so... and even that certainly isn't worth the massive load of hype that Apple is spreading around. Faithful viewer Mark McClure noticed that the Slogan O' The Day over at Apple's countdown home page is "To go where no PC has gone before." (Sort of brings a whole new perspective to our musings on the iWarp, doesn't it? "The engines canna take much more, Captain!") People are interpreting this to mean all sorts of things: a port of Mac OS X to Intel iron, for instance. As for us, we're pretty much all speculated out at this point, so we're content to wait and see... and, we hope, gasp in surprise and delight. Now where'd we put that drool bucket?...