We don't know about you, but right about now is when we usually start getting really antsy about the holidays. Specifically, since we engage the annual gift-giving occasion known as Christmas, by mid-November or thereabouts our brains make the causal connection between gift-giving and gift-getting, so we get kinda itchy for loot. By the time the Silk Nog starts showing up in the refrigerated section of the supermarket, our gift lust reaches a fever pitch-- and there's usually well over a month to go before the goods start flowing. What to do? What to do?!

Well, eating ourselves into a four-day food coma on Thanksgiving helps take the edge off, but that's still two weeks away, so in the meantime we like to get our minds off Christmas loot by speculating endlessly about Macworld loot. January's just around the corner, after all, and since nothing Uncle Steve may have up his sleeve will materialize in time to find its way under our tree this year, thinking about it doesn't get us all drooly and foaming, so it's reasonably therapeutic. Besides, there's plenty to think about, since there are definitely items in Apple's product line that will be ripe for a Stevenote revision.

For example, AppleInsider reports that "PowerPC G5 chips operating at frequencies up to 2.5 GHz have been in sampling since as early as March," and Power Macs using those chips will finally surface "by the end of January." The report implies a single 2.0 GHz G5 at the low end of the Power Mac bell curve, with dual 2.5 GHz processors taking over in the top spot. That's slightly less astounding than previous unconfirmed reports of "dual 2.8 GHz by February," and therefore slightly more believable. (After all, 2.8 GHz would put the PowerPC within 400 MHz of the current fastest Pentium 4, and as Mac users who lived through Motorola's G4 development years, we're simply not mentally prepared for such a scenario.)

But say you're not so much the "huge, imposing metal tower" type; maybe you're more in the iMac's target demographic. Well, get this-- AppleInsider adds to the gathering buzz that the iMac might be going G5 in January, even as MacRumors cites a Kodawarisan news item from last week which (according to a Babelfish translation) clearly states that "according to information, when Cube which makes one for new iMac where at the die manufacturer for the resin formation of Taiwan, it differed from the frame of the current model completely the die of form has been produced, it is thing." You don't say!

For those of you looking for something slightly more intelligible to read (oh, you're no fun anymore), MacRumors's posted translation refers to info leaked by a Taiwanese resin mold manufacturer, which describes the "completely new case" as "curiously different" and "cube-shaped." Cube-shaped? Could this be the Return of the Cube? Was Apple not just blowing smoke when it said that "there is a small chance it will reintroduce an upgraded model of the unique computer in the future"? (Remember, Apple didn't kill the Cube, it merely "suspended production.")

So forget the sugar plums, and forget the sack full of loot-- now we've got visions of G5-based Cube II iMacs dancing in our heads, set to debut in January to commemorate the Mac's twentieth birthday even as new Power Macs punch a brand new hole in the Mac's performance ceiling. Santa, Shmanta; we need to write a letter to Steve Claus. It is thing!