Wow, that was unexpected. I actually woke up this morning (uh, afternoon, that is) thinking I had to check out apple.com (yeah, so I’m a geek) to verify that Think Secret was wrong and the new 17-inch MacBook PowerBook wasn’t out today. Well, what do you know — they were right! That hadn’t happened for a while, had it?

So… it’s a hefty sum of money, of course, and they’re still not taking much advantage of the additional real estate (I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but with all that space around the keyboard, how about adding some keys or something?) except for the addition of a third USB port and a Firewire 800 port (considering the price of a high-end 15-inch model, I find it weird to save the 800 for that one — does it require that much more room on the motherboard, or is this just Apple’s discreet response to customer and columnist complaints regarding its absence from the previous models?). And, hopefully, a bigger battery… that will only compensate for the bigger screen’s power consumption.

Of course, now that such a minor Apple rumor has been proven true (I mean, seriously, everybody knew that was coming, and the rumor only consisted in announcing the exact launch time less than a week in advance), we’re back to square one of the speculation game. Are colored 13-inch MacBooks iBooks really on the way? (Probably not too soon, because that deserves a keynote, and the 17-inch laptops would have been announced at the same time.) Did Apple really have planned the iPodTablet announcement for its anniversary, only to postpone it because of engineering problems? Is Steve Jobs really going to build a 400-meter shiny white monolith on the land Apple just bought in Cupertino? Is the next version of OS X going to emulate the whole Windows API and run Windows apps? (Okay, the last one is too stupid, even Dvorak didn’t dare write that.)