Well, it's Wednesday already, so far there's still no sign of new PowerBooks popping up anywhere, and to be brutally honest, we're getting sick to death of the whole subject. If they do finally surface on Friday, the Mac community will heave a massive sigh of relief-- not so much because they can finally run out and buy a 15-inch PowerBook that supports AirPort Extreme, but because they can finally stop hearing about the freakin' things every twelve minutes. Seriously, if we hear one more thing about rumored PowerBook features, specs, and ship dates, we're going to have to hit someone with a mallet. We've come to the inescapable conclusion that obsessing over such things is a humongous waste of time, and so we're moving on to more important topics.

Like rumored iMac features, specs, and ship dates.

Yes, Think Secret reports that Apple's consumer desktop (as opposed to Apple's other consumer desktop-- to keep them straight, we generally think of the former as "Lenny" and the latter as "Squiggy") is long overdue for a little touch-up, and will soon get a rejuvenating boost in the form of faster processors, newer ports, and washboard abs courtesy of the Ab Roller. And just in time, too; the current iMac design has been around for over a year and a half, now, and it needs a little more hustle to keep the kids intrigued.

There's a distinctive theme of "Hand Me Down" running through the specs as allegedly revealed in "company documents": the 17-inch iMac is getting bumped from 1 GHz to 1.25 GHz, while the 15-incher ditches its 800 MHz chip to take over big brother's old 1 GHz unit. Similarly, the 15-incher also gets the 17-incher's castoff GeForce4 MX graphics subsystem (a distinct improvement over its previous GeForce2 MX), while the Mr. 17 moves on up to a GeForce FX 5200. Both configs will come with 256 MB of DDR RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, AirPort Extreme support, audio-in ports, and video-out. And while there's no FireWire 800, at least both systems will come with USB 2.0. None of this is particularly earth-shattering stuff, but we at least find it gratifying that soon no iMacs will have a clock speed still measured in megahertz.

As for when, the new models are reportedly already "nearly ready to ship," but there are apparently still a lot of iMacs floating around out there in the channel, so the refreshed units may be kept under wraps as late as mid-September for the Apple Expo in Paris. Of course, if this is anything like the PowerBook updates, we'll still be waiting for them come April, at which point we'll be so sick of the subject that we'll turn our attention to rumored features, specs, and ship dates of a revised Power Mac G5. And thus does the cycle of life begin anew; isn't nature wonderful?