You can believe that we are just itching to show you what the “bad-ass black & silver” Mac Pro full-tower looks like, and we’re even more frustrated that it isn’t already headed to the market. It would certainly be expensive to produce, and couldn’t be shipped in quantity for another 6-10 weeks but even just knowing that Infinite Loop’s ambitions are as stratospheric as they are has a value to Apple, we believe.

Otherwise, we would probably sit on more rumors ourselves and be more conservative in our predictions….but from our early days as Steve Jobs aggressively plugged the company’s “leaks” in the late 90′s, we have tried to act as a motivator for Apple to correct that course, to seek a middle ground where they could truly embrace the “radical openness” of the so-called Social Era.

As our founder once told Steve Jobs directly in an email (which Steve promptly made the butt of some internal jokes, we later found out…though should Ryan really have been surprised? Even he no longer thinks so), we’d be quite happy if Apple made us more or less obsolete by being more open, by engaging with “rumor sites” and the Mac Web with a mix of more access to the internal goings-on of the company and simply more effort to have an active hand in shaping such things.

Instead, Ryan was met with ridicule and no direct response by Steve, which is more or less itself par for the course even several years before he had his surgery and became chronically ill. If we sent the same email today, we’d hardly expect a response in any case, and rightly so….but then, as now, we saw the topic as an important change of direction for the company.

Nobody’s suggesting that Apple change its stripes; it presents a sleek image and doesn’t want to pull back the veneer too far. Again, rightly so. But, that image could gain a depth that it has lacked for some time, in the eyes of quite a lot of people.

There’s a reason that the very first site fully dedicated to Apple rumors (all due credit to grandmasters such as the multiple incarnations of Mac the Knife, may he Rest in Peace until & unless someone can genuinely resurrect him — at which point we’d be honored to have him guest write for Rumors!) is still around today. That is more or less the same reason why there are so many others, whether or not they truly deserve the label of regurgitation “copycats.”

The reason is simple…..Steve Jobs has had more important things to focus on over the past five years than getting on board with the social networking train, or the latest Internet groupthink in general. He is predisposed for many reasons — something we hardly begrudge — to shield his nearly life-long baby from damaging things like bad press, an inconsistent image, or the zig-zags of direction that the company took in his absence during the 80′s and early to mid 90′s. And now, in a transition period where regardless of his near-term “return” a lot of things will be evolving no matter what….there is an opportunity for Apple to embrace at least some element of showing off its developmental technologies in hardware as well as software sooner to counter the rest of the industry engaging on that very same level if not more so.

This could easily be the key to cracking the remaining 85% of the market, in our opinion. Perhaps that’s inevitable given what we do, but we’ve been saying it for more than a decade and nothing we’ve seen in that time has caused us to waver from the belief….in fact, most recently as the “radically open” style of social-networking has helped so many small companies skyrocket into success despite the challenging times, that belief has only strengthened.

That’s why we think that despite the recent stumbles on more than a few of the desktop update details (to say nothing of the predicted timing, which is of course always tied to what we’re really likely to get from the announcement), these more ambitious Macs & iDevices that we’ve been talking about — are continuing to talk about — are not far away in time nor space.

Not everyone at Apple believes that loyalty to the ideals of a “NeXT Apple” with Steve Jobs as its omnipresent captain necessarily entails following every policy that he has dictated since his return to the company. In fact, if we should deign to quote a friend who is still in regular contact with Jobs in turn quoting the man himself: “Not everything I’ve ever said was right and if it was, it doesn’t always still apply.”

If someone who has been put on a such pedestal and who has such relative faith in his own judgement as Steve can say that as recently as a few weeks ago, in reference to decisions made by executives at Infinite Loop during his day-to-day physical absence which might contradict calls he made not terribly long ago…then even among those at Apple that might want to cautiously follow his every style or standing policy can be expected to be open to embracing a shift that could unlock barriers to the company’s success virtually since its success was first ensured by Mac OS X, the iMac and iPod in the early days after NeXT became Apple became NeXT.

And no, that was not a typo.