Well, stretch out our sweater sleeves and call us Flappy-- apparently some men with pineapples are trustworthy after all! On Friday we made a throwaway reference to a "wildly unconfirmed" rumor of new bigger-disk iPods coming "as early as Monday," and sure enough, here it is and here they are: faithful viewer mrmgraphics tipped us off to pineapple-man's uncanny accuracy earlier today. Go figure. Man, the Dole people must be ecstatic.

According to Apple's press release, it seems that the low-end model is sticking fast at 10 GB for $299, but the midrange unit just got a 5 GB boost to 20 GB at its same $399 price, while the $499 top-of-the-liner is 10 GB roomier at a whopping 40 GB. By Apple's count, that's 10,000 songs in your pocket, a.k.a. "play music for a solid month straight and never hear the same song twice." Sorta makes your local radio station's "No Repeat Workday" look pretty lame, doesn't it? We're especially impressed that these storage boosts are the equivalent of Apple somehow stuffing one or two original $399 iPods completely inside the new models for free-- and without the Hulk-style tattered purple pants syndrome. We'll never doubt the veracity of tuxedo-clad mutterers bearing the fruit of the ananas comosus again.

Indeed, we only wish that we'd have listened to the guy when he also mentioned "an iMac speed bump of some proportion" ("no, really, he did-- honest!" we say; "uh-huh, suuuure he did," you say); at the time we wrote it off as just more pineapple-nut ravings, especially since we thought the rumored new iMacs were supposedly going to use the PPC7457 G4 processor, a shipment of which Motorola has allegedly owed Apple since mid-May-- you know, the same missing chips that have had us all hanging in PowerBook limbo for the past three centuries. And yet, as faithful viewer Troy Phillips points out, there is indeed another Apple press release touting "significant enhancements" to the iMac line.

So here's what's new in today's iMac: faster processors (1 GHz or 1.25 GHz G4); more and faster memory (256 MB of 333 MHz DDR SDRAM); faster graphics (nVIDIA GeForce4 MX in the 15-inch model, GeForce FX 5200 in the 17-incher); faster ports (well, at least for USB, which is now 2.0-- FireWire's still "vanilla," not FireWire 800); faster wireless (AirPort Extreme-ready); and faster virtual blood on concrete (free copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4). Whether or not you consider all that significant or just "significant" depends largely on your perspective, but to us it looks like a decent batch o' briskness to keep the LCD iMac hep and groovy here in the latter half of 2003.

So enjoy the new hardware, and we promise: if we see a scraggly guy inappropriately caressing a cantaloupe the next time we're down at the bus terminal, we'll be sure to ask him about G5 Xserves. From a safe distance, of course.