Man alive, just what is going on with Apple's displays these days? We've all been hearing rumors about a refreshed display lineup for months and months now, but nothing's changed in almost a year-- and if you listen really hard, you can hear the sounds of G5 owners asking themselves the question that keeps them up all night: "Why am I looking at transparent plastic, pinstripes, and chrome next to my perforated aluminum Power Mac?" Oh, the agony of riding that Bleeding Edge.

Well, if you're up for yet another round of whispers, Mac OS Rumors claims that Apple "expects to End-Of-Life its standard aspect 17-inch Studio Display soon" while adding a mammoth 30-inch widescreen to the high end. Think about what this means for the pros: 20 inches on the desktop, minimum. No less than 1680x1050 resolution. Hubba hubba. For all of you who tried Mac OS X on an 800x600 iBook and wondered just what Apple was thinking when it made all of the interface elements so darn big, well, now you know.

According to MOSR, we can't expect this new lineup until "February or March," but when it arrives, all three models are said to sport "all-new enclosures"-- and hey, only six months after the G5s shipped! Best of all, though, said enclosures might do away with the Apple Display Connector. Don't get us wrong; we love plugging a display into a Power Mac with just one slim cable and getting video, power, and USB all at once. What we don't like is not being able to plug said display into a DVI PowerBook (or, heaven forfend, a Wintel system) without blowing yet another $149 on an ADC-to-DVI converter.

Apple's alleged new connection scheme isn't quite as elegant as ADC: it's a single cable that ends in separate DVI, power, and USB plugs, reminiscent of the company's old AudioVision monitors. (Those were worse, though-- the cable snaked out into video, audio in, audio out, and ADB. Yeesh.) So there's still a single cable, but things are a smidge messier at the computer end unless you have a future Mac that Apple designed with clustered ports specifically to handle these cables. Still, it's a small price to pay for having an Apple display that you can actually hook up to other devices with little more than a cheap adapter. As always, we'll believe it when we see it. Or maybe an hour or so afterwards... it depends on whether or not we'll have had lunch yet.