My brother managed laptop distribution for Gateway, and just interviewed to be the Portables Distro Manager for the Asia region at Apple's Headquarters. He described the interview as "Seven of the brightest minds I've ever been in a room with." He said they asked him questions like "It's 3:15pm. What is the difference in degrees between the small hand and the big hand?" and "You come home to find an elephant in your backyard. What do you do with it?" He said the last guy was a VP with 2 PHD's that handed him a sharpy, and said "Go up to the board and teach me something I don't know."
I joked with him that it will be KILLER to have a family member that knows the skinny on the portables roadmap. He immediately shut me down, saying that even as the distro manager he would not be told anything about the system specifications until the day of release, and even the exact release date is not revealed. Only the quarter of release, and the projects internal codename. Nothing else. Then the week of release, he gets a total alotment to be distributed to Asias region (say 30,000 at launch) and based on internal sales info he decides what units go where.
And he made sure to mention that he wasn't telling me jack sh*t about anything there until its public knowledge. He always was a little punk.
If the friggin' Portables Distro Manager knows nothing about specific release date or system specs, what do you figure the local schmuck at the genius bar knows? Less then nada.