Gee, do we detect an uncharacteristic amount of patience surrounding next month's arrival of a G5-based iMac? Normally we'd expect everyone to be swapping guesses about the new product's specs and intro date with a giddiness of an almost unseemly nature. Maybe it's because it's not a rumor, but cold, hard fact: Apple itself stated publicly that a G5 iMac is slated for a September introduction back when it had to admit that it had run out of G4-based models too far in advance. Faced with that level of certainty, apparently your average rumor hound backs off and goes sniffing around topics that are less cut-and-dried, nosing out tidbits about Disney buyouts and the return of the Newton and an imminent invasion by a war fleet from Steve's home planet. You know, topics with a little more breathing room, speculationally speaking.

That still doesn't explain the dearth of speculation about the G5 iMac's feature set, however, although now that point may be moot: faithful viewer Richard Plotkin was first to inform us that Think Secret has spilled much beanage about the upcoming third-generation systems, which, based on the specs pulled from "incontrovertible evidence," sound like a solid leap forward for anyone in the market for a powerful all-in-one system. Reportedly there will be four configurations-- two 17-inch models running at 1.6 GHz, and two 20-inchers at 1.8 GHz. Each has a full complement of the ports 'n' goodies of the iMac G4, plus an optical digital audio output and "an eye catcher" of a new all-in-one design, with "the logic board, optical drive, and other components housed on the back of the flat-panel display." Sources describe the physical design as kinda like a Sony VAIO W700G, only, you know, not ugly.

Now, usually we put a lot of faith in Think Secret reports on upcoming hardware specs, because the site's track record has been solid over the years. Allow us the briefest moment of skepticism, though, about the claim that the lowest-end G5 iMac, designed primarily for education use, lacks both a modem and any sort of optical drive whatsoever. No modem? No problem, and it makes perfect sense, since who needs a modem in every Mac in a school lab? But the optical drive thing strikes us as stretching credulity a bit; sure, it'd keep costs down, and schools have no doubt "experienced increased security problems" with kids burning illegal copies of software and the like, but what's wrong with throwing in a cheap and read-only CD-ROM drive? Because without one, installing software could only happen via the network, and reinstalling the operating system or performing a system restore would be problematic at best. It just sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

[ADDENDUM: faithful viewer Charles Gaba notes that Apple already sells a "Without Optical" low-end eMac to education purchasers. So the answer to the next question is "not a lot."]

Still, what the heck do we know? Maybe schools have been clamoring for a Mac with no removable media drive and they'll eat these things up like deep-fried Mars bars dipped in liquid crack. And if these specs are fake, kudos to the hoaxer for getting those little details correct; who else but Apple would introduce machines as butt-kicking as these and then hobble them all with 256 MB of RAM? So, fingers crossed until Apple Expo kicks off on the 31st; here's hoping that Steve will be feeling well enough to keynote and that he really does have some iMac-y goodness to share with the class.