Late last night, Apple reportedly posted 'G5' specs on the online Apple Store. A lot of the rumor sites, of course, leapt on this information, with many speculating that someone at Apple made a big mistake by leaking these supposed specs early. But Slashdot's posting on the matter proposes it as a marketing ploy.
Marketing ploy or accident, MANY sites beyond just the rumor ones are carrying the story. This is in advance of anything having been released. A lot more attention now will focus on next week's World Wide Developers Conference keynote from Steve Jobs. Whether Apple intended it or not, people are talking about it with pretty ravenous fury now. If this isn't clever marketing, I don't know what is.
Personally, I'm more interested in what Apple will show of Panther, the next release of Mac OS X. Now that both Apple and Microsoft have fulfilled their long time dreams of getting their consumer OS's onto a more stable platform (OS X for Mac, NT for Windows (Windows 2000 is 'NT 5.0', and Windows XP is 'NT 5.1')), they have chances now to finally get back to doing some cool new things like we all dreamed about in the mid-90's (when Pink/Taligent and Cairo seemed attainable).