So at this point you may well be wondering whether Apple is just mocking us all; after all, here we are on a Monday chock-full of updated hardware announcements, and yet refreshed PowerBooks are nowhere to be seen. Seriously, was anyone out there asking for a 40 GB iPod? Were there any death threats in play over Apple's continued inability to grant its customers the inalienable human right to carry ten thousand songs in one's pocket (nine thousand, if one of them's "Freebird")? Not as far as we know. And yet, legions of starving PowerBook fanatics with foam-flecked lips and wild eyes just got stepped on yet again. When will the abuse end?

Answer: soon. Real soon. Lack of PowerBooks aside, today's batch of fresh-from-the-oven hardware updates was actually good news from a PowerBook perspective. Well, okay, maybe not as good as actually getting the freakin' PowerBooks, but good nonetheless, because whereas the high-end PowerBook tops out at 1 GHz, the iMac now reaches 1.25 GHz. Okay, yeah, that's kind of painful to consider, but keep in mind the Sixth Commandment: "Thou shalt not runneth consumer products at higher clock speeds than professional gear." (Okay, maybe it's not actually a commandment. But we're pretty sure it's in the Bible somewhere. Near the back, probably.) We're not saying that the new iMacs are actually faster than the current PowerBooks; they might be, but cache issues, bus speeds, and all that jazz come into play. Regardless, the important thing is that the iMacs look faster because of the GHz discrepancy, and that's a big marketing no-no.

"Yeah, and the iMacs probably use that new PPC7457 G4 chip that's been holding up the PowerBooks, right? So new iMacs means the chips are finally here!" Well, uh, no. As far as we can tell by scoping out the tech specs, the new iMacs are using the very 7455 that is apparently oh-so-unsuitable for use in a portable that isn't hooked up to a diesel generator and a heat sink the size of Montana. But that's not to say that the 7457 isn't coming any day now; MacBidouille has rumors of a 7457 breakthrough just last week ("hey, everybody, Motorola found the 'on' switch!"), with "30,000 1.25 GHz certified CPUs and 20,000 1.3 GHz ones" rolling off the lines. We're just guessing, here, but we bet Apple could launch a 1.3 GHz PowerBook line-up with chips for twenty thousand units in the first production run, right?

Plus, there's the whole Wow Factor; don't forget, Steve's got a keynote to deliver next week, and obviously his big surprise isn't going to be new iPods or faster iMacs. Suddenly the odds of a Paris PowerBook Extravaganza are starting to look pretty darn good. But actually, now that we think about it, these long-awaited speed-bumped PowerBooks are really no bigger an update than the refreshed iMacs, which only ranked a press release, not Stevenote status. So could new PowerBooks really make the cut for a Stevetacular surprise? Maybe Apple's counting on pent-up demand to lend the announcement some drama. Or maybe the new PowerBooks are going to be packing something that no one's yet expecting, like fuel cell technology or an integrated trouser press. Or, dare we say, a G5?

Actually, since laptop-friendly G5s won't surface until 2004 at the earliest, no, we don't dare. But we're liking the trouser press idea. Our jeans are all wrinkly.