Oh, yeah-- what with all the wackiness and hilarity surrounding the nature of Apple's flubtabulous leak, we kindasorta forgot to consider the implications of what actually got leaked in the first place. Unless someone's yanking our chains in an extremely nasty and not-at-all-nice manner, it now seems darn near certain that come Monday, Apple's new low-end professional desktop Mac will pack a 1.6 GHz PowerPC 970-- which, according to just about everything we've managed to read about the chip without falling into a deep, deep slumber, may well blow the doors off the dual 1.42 GHz G4s currently perched in Apple's top spot.

This, we imagine, will be a Good Thing™.

Meanwhile, the top of the line looks to house dual 2.0 GHz 970s, which, in addition to absolutely crushing any prior Mac performance-wise, might very well give the zippiest Wintel desktops a run for their money. What's Intel up to now, in terms of clock speed? 3 GHz? So even if we completely ignore the Megahertz Myth (like, you know, pretty much everyone else does), Apple's actually going to ship a processor that's two-thirds the clock speed of Intel's fastest. When was the last time that happened? And the fact that there are two of them in there, well, let's do some Joe Shmoe Math, shall we? Lessee, 2 + 2 = 4, and 4 = 3 + 1, so... Apple's top system must be "one faster" than the Wintel! The company's success in the marketplace is assured!

This is probably also a Good Thing™.

Indeed, we don't pretend to know diddly about the stock market, but just for the heck of it we took a gander at AAPL after the specs leaked. Now, yes, the markets are closed, but it looks to us like AAPL's asking price is $25.96-- nearly seven bucks higher than its closing price of $19.14 yesterday. That very well may mean absolutely squat; for all we know that asking price of $25.96 has been sitting there since hours before the leak happened and means nothing more than Phil Schiller ran out of Goober Grape, but regardless, we're still pretty interested to see what happens to the stock price once the markets open tomorrow. If AAPL skyrockets the way it should (do these things ever work the way they should?), then Apple shareholders may well be in for a windfall that could actually pay for one of those speedy new G5s.

That would definitely be a Good Thing™.

Then again, there's still plenty we don't know. The big unknown right now is price; having a dual 2 GHz G5 in the product line-up isn't going to do anyone much good if Apple gives it a sticker price of $1.2 billion. We're expecting these suckers to carry something of a price premium, given the pent-up demand in the professional market right now (and the long-awaited availability of QuarkXPress for Mac OS X). In fact, we wouldn't be terribly surprised if Apple keeps some low-end G4 configurations around for the budget-conscious professional and education sales, but that's just a hunch.

Note that we also still don't know what this doohickey looks like; we have nothing but faith in the capable hands of Apple's design guru Jonathan Ive, but even geniuses have off-days. Then again, we suspect that the G5s will be so freaking fast that most Mac fans would buy one even if it came in an enclosure made entirely out of rotting liver and shaped like the head of Pat Morita.

On the plus side, not knowing the look or the price is keeping us pretty psyched for Monday's shindig. Hey, who'dathunkit? Not knowing stuff is also a Good Thing™!