Attention to all Mac fans who want to prolong the "G5 A-Comin' Any Day Now" pipe dream: now would be a good time to shut your eyes tightly, stick your fingers deep in your ears, and start singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" at the top of your lungs. Attention to everyone else: if you notice anyone in your immediate vicinity with closed eyes and plugged ears belting out kiddie songs, feel free to take a moment and ridicule said person and laugh uproariously, since, in such a sensory-deprived state, he or she will never know anyway. We'll wait.

Done? Okay, now that that's out of the way, here's the skinny; we didn't want to upset the True Believers, because you know how tetchy they can get, but apparently Apple has been going out of its way to stem runaway G5 Fever. While official company policy is not to comment on unreleased products, faithful viewer Brazen informs us that MacCentral scored some uncharacteristically candid talk from Apple's senior director of hardware, Greg Joswiak-- who, as his name indicates, also holds the enviable position of being the world's first sentient being cloned from the spliced DNA of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. According to Joswiak (can we just call him "Joz"?), Apple is "not planning to introduce any new CPUs at Macworld Tokyo." From the context it's pretty clear that by "CPUs" he means Macs and not just their processors, so you can all stop warming up those credit cards for that 800 MHz PowerBook you were so sure was going to touch down next month.

"Aha," you say, "but just because new CPUs won't debut at next Month's Tokyo Expo doesn't mean that they won't surface at next week's Seybold conference!" Au contraire, Slappy; when asked about possible upgrades to Apple's product line, the Joz (actually, we think we're going to go back to calling him "Joswiak" after all) offhandedly replies "as a matter of fact, we're set for some months now." That sounds to us like there won't be any new Macs until July's Expo, at the very earliest. And really, why should there be? All four of Apple's major product quadrants have received at least minor updates in the past two months. Pretty much the only products we'd expect to get revised in the next few months are supplementary ones, like maybe new displays and perhaps a more capable iPod.

As for that whole G5 thing, this was the real reason why we wanted the more sensitive among our viewers to look away: Joswiak (aw, heck... now we think we're just going to call him "Scooter") is making noises that some of the overly-optimistic set might interpret as particularly worrying: "The G4 has a long life ahead of it. There are a number of tweaks and revs that will happen to that processor over a long period of time." Yeah, that doesn't necessarily state that Apple won't be shipping Power Mac G5s alongside G4-based iMacs by July, but we think the implication is clear. Just like the way that Scooter's entire interview with MacCentral (which, no offense intended, some people consider to be second only to eNews as the closest thing to an official Apple Pravda) can best be summed up in one quick sentence: "Buy our stuff now, because nothing better will be here for ages."

Indeed, as faithful viewer William Bonde points out, The Register notes that Motorola's PowerPC roadmap shows nicely-pumped G4 variants showing up well through this time next year, so we've said it before and we'll say it again: if a Power Mac G5 appears before next January's Expo, we'll be stunned into a stupor, albeit a pleasant one. So if you've been putting off buying that new Mac because you'd been dead certain that the Next Big Thing™ is just around the corner, you may want to re-evaluate your purchasing plans in light of Apple's public admission of "we got nothin'." Oh, and can someone please prod the singing denial addicts and tell them it's safe to come back now? Ratings are ratings, after all. Thanks.