Some speculate Apple decided to delay iLife's introduction to make it coincide - or come very close to - the introduction of new desktop models, that should come with the multimedia suite already installed.

Almost one month ago, before the MacWorld Expo and the surprise announcement of the new PowerBooks, I suggested only minor speed bumps/upgrades to the iMac (iLamp version) and eMac desktops. But having seen what MWSF brought to the table I think it's safe to assume that the new machines will be Airport Extreme ready - meaning they can take advantage of the newer and faster 802.11g wireless ethernet standard.

Integrated Bluetooth is also a fairly safe bet - after all it shouldn't be too expensive or difficult to implement. FireWire 800 is an entirely different matter, as even Apple themselves decided to leave it out of the new 12" PowerBook. I think that at most we could see it on the very top of the line iMac model - which I still think will retain a 17" screen, for price and balance concerns, as a 19" screen would push the iMac well over $2,000.

The iLamp iMac is 13 months old, and sorely needs a huge revamp of its motherboard, GPU and CPU. It seems that Apple is finally jumping on the DDR wagon, and it'd certainly be nice if they implemented it on the whole consumer desktop lineup - thus leaving only the iBook and the aging 15" PowerBook to still use PC-100 and PC-133 SDRAM memory respectively.

My biggest concerns though are related to the GPUs these machines will use. Except for the 17-inch iMac - which comes with a GeForce 4 MX--they all currently sport very pitiful GeForce 2 MX video cards, all of them are equipped with only 32MB of DDR video memory. My hope is for the new machines to come equipped with 64MB ATI Radeon 9000 chips, but given Apple's recent (bad) choice for the PowerBooks this seems quite unlikely. Hope dies hard though.

To be fair with their customers, Apple should compensate the painfully slow CPU performance with great peripherals, accessories and bundles - like including an Airport Extreme card across the whole lineup, for example - but I'm only dreaming about such a thing.

Given the processor speeds at which the new PowerBooks were introduced I don't see anything dramatically new from Motorola, and if this is true we can expect the models to top out at 1GHz at most. Which is certainly fairly pitiful, but less pitiful than the current configurations.

It'll really be a very long and painful wait until the 64-bit PowerPC 970 arrives... µ