Geez, after something of a famine last week, between AirPort Express today and a "mysterious" (hee hee hee) music-related announcement slated for a special press event in London in a week or so, we're all feeling nice and full, right? Well, don't put down that fork just yet, because there's always room for JELL-O: rumor has it that Apple's going to serve us up a big, jiggling mound of gelatinous goodness in the form of yet another new product intro. Tomorrow.

Get this: remember that interim G5 speed-bump to 2.5ish GHz we had all been waiting for since, oh, roughly New Year's or so? Of course you do; we were yammering on about it practically twice a day for months. Well, when it finally became apparent that Apple wouldn't get sufficient quantities of 90-nanometer G5s from IBM to ship the product revision before May, everyone very sensibly assumed that Apple would just skip the interim speed and make the leap right to Steve's promised 3.0 GHz Holy Land come WWDC. For ages now, it's been conventional wisdom among the rumor fiends that anyone expecting a new series of Power Mac models before June 28th is suffering the ill effects of some bad cheese.

But look, up in the sky-- it's a bird! It's a plane! It's... a last-minute prediction of vaguely disappointing interim G5 models! That's right, folks; Think Secret (who usually has a very solid track record on this sort of thing) reports that "Apple will announce speed bumps to its Power Mac G5 towers as fast as 2.6 GHz," and this earthshattering announcement will come "tomorrow, on Tuesday, June 8." Further details are annoyingly absent, bar the claim that existing G5 prices will drop in order to let Apple clear inventory alongside shipping new models; reportedly 1.6 GHz systems will drop to $1,599, dual 1.8 GHz models will slide to $2,199, and the right-now-top-of-the-line-but-tomorrow-not-so-much dual 2.0 GHz units will come in at a very attractive $2,499.

Can it possibly be true? If Apple ships these speed-bumped models tomorrow, what does that mean for the WWDC Stevenote? Well, assuming that the rumor is the real deal, we see two possibilities. The first is that Steve will indeed introduce a fourth high-end model with dual 3.0 GHz processors, with immediate preordering and delivery expected in late September; that would allow him to keep his promise of 3.0 GHz "within twelve months." The other is that 3.0 GHz by this summer turned out to be a pipe dream, this speed bump is it for a while, and Steve will conveniently neglect to mention the G5 at all, pretending that no such promise was ever made. Fingers crossed for the former-- again, provided this whole "speed bumps tomorrow" scenario isn't just some feverish opium dream that wound up online.

That's a big assumption, too-- especially since Think Secret includes the typical caveat about how "dates for speed bumps can be subject to change," so don't be too surprised if tomorrow brings us exactly zilch. And frankly, zilch wouldn't be half bad, seeing as 2.6 GHz is going to feel a little flat after a year's worth of waiting for 3.0 GHz instead. At least no speed bump would totally keep the dream alive for WWDC. Check your watches; if it's after, say, 2 PM EDT on Tuesday, and the Apple Store hasn't been updated, we're probably in the clear. If the speed bumps do show up, don't mind us-- we'll just be over here huddled fetal in the corner, muttering "3.0 GHz... Steve said 3.0 GHz..." like some kind of mantra.