The rumors were true - updated iMacs, hot off the griddle! It seems the only thing they didn’t get was that it was happening a day earlier than the customary Tuesday announcement.

So what’s up? Same price, better specs! Core2Duo Penryns, faster speeds, more goodies:

• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• 802.11n WiFi
• Gigabit Ethernet
• built-in iSight
• 5x USB2
• Firewire 400
• Firewire 800
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

Here’s the breakdown:

• 20-inch iMac: 2.4GHz proc, 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (1680 x 1050), 1GB RAM, 250GB 7200RPM disk, $1,199.
• 20-inch iMac: 2.66GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1680 x 1050), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM disk, $1,499.
• 24-inch iMac: 2.8GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200rpm disk, $1,799.
• 24-inch iMac: 3.06GHz proc, 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm disk, $2,199.

Available now. Here. Cool.

I’ve always wondered about the people endlessly tinkering around with the demo units at Apple stores. What the heck are they doing? Playing games? Surfing? Emailing?

Well, we know what one person was doing - writing a book.

Isobella Jade, an aspiring commercial model, has actually written her memoirs without owning her own computer. She’d write bits and pieces on demo units inside an Apple Store in Soho, New York, saving the files to her Yahoo account in email form, day after day. Isobella says she’s too poor to buy her own iMac, so she mooched off the Apple Store until her book, Almost 5′ 4″ was finished.

I remember one of my favorite writers, Harlan Ellison, who as a publicity stunt wrote one entirely while inside a store display window where you could watch him work from the street. Isobella’s stunt is more sneaky, though.

Her book has been self-published, but she has signed over the world rights to The Friday Project in the UK, and a commercial version of Almost 5′4″ will be available next year.

How she did it, and an interview with the author, is over at the Mental Floss blog.

(And man, here I am with 5 computers, and I can’t even finish one. Sheesh.)

So it was the graphics card after all!

Apple’s released iMac Graphics Firmware Update 1.0, which specifically fixes the freezing issue of the new iMacs, which it turns out is directly related to firmware issues with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO video hardware in them.

The freezing has been a long-standing issue that had people scratching their heads because recent updates purported to fix the problem but actually did nothing. Users of the new iMacs had their computers just lock up on them at random intervals, with no seeming rhyme, reason or recurring circumstances. People have speculated that it was a video issue, and this update confirms it. Apple says

This update is for 20-inch and 24-inch aluminum iMac computers with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO graphics processor, running Mac OS X 10.4.10 with iMac Software Update 1.2.1 for Tiger, or Mac OS X 10.5 with iMac Software Update 1.3 for Leopard.”

So go and thaw out your new iMacs by running Software Update.

Apple’s released a couple of updates:

MacBook Pro Software Update 1.2 is for the 2.2/2.4 GHz versions and improves graphic stability. It’s a 14.4MB download you can get via Software Update or directly here.

iMac Software Update 1.2 repairs the random freeze issue plaguing some 20- and 24-inch iMacs running on 2.0/2.4/2.8GHz processors. It also provides the usual “important bug fixes”. It comes for two species - Tiger is 13.3MB and can be had here, and for Leopards it’s 21.6MB and can be had here. Alternately, you can get SU to do it for you.

It hasn’t happened to me, but a lot of users of the new metal iMacs have been experiencing inexplicable freezing incidents where the only solution is to hard-boot the computer, and recently Apple has acknowledged the problem, according to Macworld.

An Apple spokesperson told them “A small number of iMac users have made us aware that a recent software update issued by Apple can sometimes cause their iMacs to freeze, requiring them to restart their iMac.”

Apple apologized to users and promises to track down and fix the problem, hopefully in a few weeks. “We are tracking down the root cause of this bug, and will issue a software update which corrects it as soon as we can — most likely later this month,” the spokesperson said.