Ask and ye shall receive! Just yesterday we noted the plethora of Mac hardware release date rumors flying all over the place, but lamented that while Power Macs, PowerBooks, iMacs, and eMacs were all covered in one sense or another, none of the rumors seemed to address the possibility of a revision to the iBook. Well, evidently that old Arabian-looking oil lamp we were polishing at the time is worth more than the twenty bucks it'd fetch on eBay, because less than 24 hours later. the granddaddy of all Mac rumors sites tossed us a doozy. (We're hoping tradition holds, here, and we still have two wishes left-- because otherwise, man what a waste.)

Faithful viewer Jamie Pool reports that our wish for whispers of a near-term iBook revision has come to fruition; Mac OS Rumors claims that the next iBook update is slated for "mid-year" and won't come to much more than "a modest speed/spec bump" to "incrementally faster and lower-power/temperature G4s at up to 1.25 GHz" and "incremental improvements in hard disk size, GPU, memory bandwidth, etc." In other words, it'll be the classic speed bump, which is pretty much what any of us would expect, following the slightly more major move from the G3 processor to the G4 last October. And the timing's about right, too, since Apple generally likes to revise each product line every six to nine months if possible. In other words, this part of the rumor's nothing special, although it's definitely nice that it completes yesterday's set.

But here's where things get juicy: MOSR claims that "several new reports" and even some "internal Apple memos" point to a serious overhaul of the iBook line after the mid-year speed bump resets the 6-to-9-month revision clock. Allegedly Apple is looking to put the iBook on some radical new diet, hoping to get the 14-inch model, which currently weighs in at just under six pounds, down to a seriously anorexic "under four pounds" and "several millimeters thinner than today's aluminum PowerBooks." And Apple hopes to do this without sacrificing any features at all; this bag-of-bones iBook will supposedly boast 1280x1024 resolution, a 1.6 GHz "G4-class" processor, DDR400 memory, a 60 GB hard drive, and even a slot-loading SuperDrive. Oh, and despite the seriously reduced weight, this sucker will allegedly pack a battery that will last for six full hours of real-world use. And yet the tech specs aren't supposed to be the selling point; the thin-and-light "iBook mini" form factor is.

Is it a pipe dream? Maybe, especially since MOSR claims that the time frame on this thing is "later this year" or possibly "January." All we know is, if we do have two more wishes on this lamp thingy, one of them is going to be for one of these iBook minis. The other is probably going to be for a sandwich of some sort. We're a little peckish-- and heck, we're not the ones who have to shed a third of our weight by January.