That dastardly Steve! First he gets us all hopped up on Panther by showing off new gee-whiz features like scampering windows and spinning cubes, and then he goes and kills our buzz by announcing that it's going to ship commercially "before the end of this year." As we all know, in marketingspeak, "before the end of this year" is a variable time frame stretching from December 31st all the way back to, say, December 28th-- which means that the non-developers among us are going to be waiting a looooong time before we get to play with all the new toys. Meanwhile, Apple's preview pages are like methadone to a heroin junkie-- they don't do much but hold the worst of the sickness at bay. We gotta have the real thing, people, but unfortunately it looks like we're going to be fighting off withdrawal symptoms from Steve's "free taste" all the way into the dark days of December.

Or are we? At MacRumors's suggestion, we managed to suppress the shakes long enough to check out MacBidouille's note on the subject, and Google's translation indicates that Panther might show up "much more quickly" than the end-of-the-year drop dead date. According to "a source which one can describe as reliable," barring any last-minute catastrophes, "the final version of Panther will be presented by Steve at Keynote of Apple Expo on September 16, 2003." (Interesting that Apple Expo's keynote page doesn't mention Steve at all, though it's certainly not a stretch to think he'd make the trip again.)

Now, we know what you're thinking: "What the heck is MacBidouille doing posting rumors that aren't about the G5?" Yeah, that threw us, too, but the G5 is at least mentioned in passing (in the context that early buyers will probably get the Panther upgrade for free), so at least it's not totally G5-free rumorological content and we needn't rush to the conclusion that MacBidouille's proprietors were killed in the night and replaced with sentient alien pod-things. Besides, as MacRumors points out, this info corroborates a pre-WWDC prediction of a "mid-September" release by eWEEK, whose Matt the Rothenberg is not typically way off base about this sort of thing. So if you're the optimistic type, you may want to keep $129 on hand for September 16th just in case.

If the September 16th release date does pan out, no one will be happier than us, since that would mean three fewer months of cold sweats and thinking there are bugs crawling all over our skin than we are currently anticipating. That said, we're not putting a ton of stock in the mid-September reports just yet, because if Panther is really on track for shipment in just two months' time, it doesn't seem like Steve to pad the ship date by three extra months like that. (If anything, we'd figure he'd knock a couple months off.) There's also the fact that the developer release is chock full of "To Be Implemented" placeholders, which doesn't bode well for an early commercial release. Still, even the tiniest sliver of hope helps keep the delirium at bay...