Apple’s ability to energize technology fans is well documented, to the point that technology fans assume they will be energized by any Apple announcement. This can lead to disappointment, as it did at this year’s WWDC keynote. By the same token, it can also lead geeks to contort their tastes to avoid the cognitive dissonance of being letdown by Herr Jobs. In other words, we can’t handle the notion that Jobs will be boring, so whatever he talks about must excite us.

The past week has been a strange one as gadget sites have competed to break the latest news about an Apple project supposedly code-named “Brick.” The consensus emerged that Brick is a new manufacturing process that allows laptop frames to be created from a single block of aluminum.

Now, what I just told you there, to a rational person, was very, very boring. I enjoy a good episode of How It’s Made as much as the next guy, but come on, manufacturing-process gossip ought to be the bottom of the tech-journalism barrel. Yet “Brick” was easily last week’s top story, and at today’s MacBook announcement, it was the showcase piece. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, gave a lecture on MacBook manufacturing. They had a short video of the new process. Jobs passed around a piece of the new frame for journalists to fondle. Etc.

When people talk about Steve Jobs’ iconic “reality distortion field,” the implication is often that he makes his fans believe things that aren’t true. More accurately, though, the RDF makes you care about things you wouldn’t otherwise give a second thought. As you read stories about the new MacBooks in the coming days, you will inevitably encounter a blurb about the manufacturing process. Ask yourself, why do the reporters writing these stories suddenly care how Apple carves the aluminum for its laptops? Because Jobs made them care, and he does it better than anyone on earth.

Apple knows how to sell its products, but careful: That doesn’t mean they don’t have quality kit to back up their talk. Sweet lord do I want one of those MacBook Pros.