Aw, boooooo! We were just getting into the swing of full-on irrational pipe-dream Stevenote speculation, and then someone had to go and step on our buzz by injecting logic and reason into the whole process. There's a reason why it's a felony to tell kids under age 7 that there's no Santa Claus, you know? Plain and simple, people need fairy tales every once in a while, and Mac fans more than most. As a matter of fact, in the extreme case, we know of at least two people who'd probably perish from an overdose of sheer reality if they ever gave up their white-knuckled conviction and accepted that [ATTENTION JESSE AND MARK: please skip to the next paragraph immediately] Apple probably isn't planning on releasing a PDA anytime soon.

But reality, harsh mistress though she may be, does bake some decent cookies now and then, so we suppose that we can forgo a little denial and face the awful truth about the iMac G5: namely, that the chances of it surfacing in any way, shape, or form this Monday are slimmer than a stick insect on Atkins. Faithful viewer David Triska notes that Think Secret has gotten positively snippy on the subject, calling any such speculation "ridiculous," "loony," and "way off," citing the lack of a webcast as the prime evidence that no such major product revision can possibly take place. (Although we do have to wonder about the further claim that "June is too early to roll out a consumer product that needs just the right amount of momentum entering the holiday buying season"; wasn't the iMac G4 introduced in January?)

Not that this is anything we didn't already know deep down inside, of course; indeed, we mentioned the webcast worriment when exploring the various doodads that folks have been predicting for a Monday debut. And Think Secret doesn't even mention the fact that an Apple official went on record just a couple of weeks ago to state that cramming a G5 into an iMac "would be a heck of a challenge," implying that we shouldn't exactly be holding our breath. But don't get too down in the mouth, sports fans; assuming that the folks at Think Secret are right about all this stuff (and in our experience, they usually are), while hoping for iMac G5s at WWDC is an act of the purest folly, at least we should finally get those new aluminum-clad displays, which aren't exactly the sort of product that Apple needs to introduce at some massive media event. Yeah, they're cool, but they're displays, you know? They're not going to get evening news coverage unless they also smell like fresh-baked pizza and cure all forms of cancer, and our own sources tell us that Apple is still at least eighteen months from delivering that technology.

Still, it would have been nice to keep the iMac G5 dream alive, no matter how unlikely such an announcement might be. Guess we'll just have to sub in one of the other fantasy product mainstays to get our fix of boundless optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence. Hey Jesse, Mark! What's this we hear about a new Apple handheld coming this Monday?