The Definitive all iRumor iMac

When there’s a Mac soiree coming up the rumors inevitably start swirling like bacteria floating over a poorly cleaned toilet. Usually the big rumors wait for MacWorld San Francisco but this year there was a glitch, the new iMac wasn’t ready on time so the gristmill is fed to the point of popping for the Paris Expo. I’ll make the admission that I’m a rumor junkie (My name’s Chris. Hi Chris) and I love all the pointless speculation. Most people are solidly in the entertainment value only camp when the subject turns to Apple’s products of a phantasmagorical nature (thus far) but for some the rumors are more serious. For a few any rumor slowly calcifies in their brains changing from obvious random guessing to indubitable fact. Unfortunately when the new product is revealed these folks suffer from severe disappointment.

Which is a bit of an oddity, you’d think a missed prediction would go hardest on the folks who present the rumors, particularly those who present them as fact. That is, unfortunately, not the case. No, like the seemingly monthly predictions on the cover of the Weekly World News people remember only the “hits” and never the “misses”. Thus individuals who got it wrong the first time can guess anew without a credibility penalty for their earlier poor prognostications. Which is a pretty good deal for the diviners of new Macness, it’s unlimited “do overs” (unsurprisingly you won’t get that chance in Vegas). So we have arrived at the only legitimate use of rumors: entertainment. Think of the rumors as reality television, sure there are compelling moments but in the end it’s just a cheap way to get people to watch.

When the new iMac is rolled out you’ll hear two things: “It’s too expensive” and “It’s exactly like I said it would be”.  Of course someone is going to be arbitrarily close enough to the actual iMac that they will appear to either have super high level inside Apple contacts or some kind of extrasensory perception. It will just be an illusion, with so many people guessing on so little information at least one person is bound to come close if for no other reasons than confirmation bias and random luck. So when the iMac is finally rolled out and looks exactly like some obscure website said it was going to look remember: It wasn’t that they knew, they got lucky.

There are a few things that are not desultory speculation:

- Apple has announced that a new iMac will be available in September.
- The new iMac will feature a G5 processor.
- Apple has filed for a patent on a color-changing scheme (twice).
- Apple has filed for a portable handheld computing device patent.
- Toshiba said they have orders from Apple for a 60 GB version of the drive used in the iPod.

And that’s all the publicly available info. Only the first two tidbits are surely related to the iMac the rest are ancillary chunks of info that may or may not debut in an iMac. Of course the mongers of all things rumor take the info and utilize it like a chef uses recipe ingredients. They mix them, they match them, go a little heavy on one ingredient a little light on another, mix in a little bit of imagination (imagination is the paprika of the computing world) and come up with a million different ideas. The configurations are rolled out like the most ostentatious presentations of a five star restaurant and offered as a sure fire, stone cold LOCK.

On the other hand rumors are all I have to go with, my sole source of lacking info so to speak. So I’ve carefully designed, nay, scribbled on paper, what the new iMac must include to make all the rumors true. I present:

The Definitive All iRumor iMac:

Now if Apple produces some monstrosity that that even slightly resembles the above “thing” I suggest, strongly, you run to the nearest store and go fully Wintel. On the other hand surely some specification or design element in the above cartoon will at least bear a quickly passing resemblance the actual iMac. In that event: Remember you saw it here first.