Things are still kinda slow in the Apple world, and they'll probably stay that way for a few more days while everyone adjusts to the new iPod products, but on the plus side, there's still plenty of entertainment value in watching Apple's stock price. It closed over $52 yesterday, just a hair short of the highest analyst target price on the books (and eight bucks over the consensus) before finally declining a bit in after-hours trading, which we thought signalled the end of its meteoric rise as traders finally cashed in their shares for a new Rolex or three. (Incidentally, has anyone else's spam content become 99% Rolex-related over the past week or so? Because it's really starting to wig us out.) But during active trading at production time, AAPL was up again by another 70 cents or so, and we're starting to wonder if the price can finally claw its way back up to the bubble-era levels of the spring of 2000.

There's just one thing that concerns us: if people are buying AAPL because they're putting their faith into certain rumors about Apple's upcoming product lines, we might see a frenzied sell-off if those rumors don't come to pass. In particular, we're a little concerned that, according to CNET, Merrill Lynch is partially basing its revenue projections on the expected introduction of "a flash memory-based iPod that could start selling early next year in the $149 price range, $100 less than Apple currently charges for its 4 GB iPod mini." If that sounds at all familiar, it should; an analyst at Thomas Weisel has been insisting for weeks that a flash-based iPod is in the works. So now there are two analysts on board with the flashPod speculation-- and what's interesting is that they each cite different sources.

See, Thomas Weisel's Jason Pflaum points to his sources in Asia when he pegs Apple as having signed with chipmaker SigmaTel to provide the controller chips for the flashPod, and he thinks the product will ship by the end of the year. Steven Milunovich at Merrill Lynch, on the other hand, bases his prediction on "a recent meeting with Apple executives," and doesn't think the flashPod will hit store shelves until after the holidays. So let's see, here... we've got two analysts with separate sources (and one of those sources is an Apple meeting), both predicting flash-based iPods within the next, say, six months. And on top of that, Think Secret has sources who "have confirmed that components for the device are currently in production" and expect the product out by year's end as well. Think Secret has a pretty good track record with info on unannounced Apple products. So can the flashPod be real?

Well, sure, it can; we just wonder about the likelihood, that's all. When Apple decided to target the lower-end of the portable music player market, the company could have gone with a flash-based product, but released the iPod mini instead, insisting that flash players were cheap, so people bought them, but they held so little music that no one bothered to use them. Now, granted, flash capacities have gone up a bit since then, but if you've watched the QuickTime stream of last Tuesday's music event, then you heard Steve's jab at "all the flash players than people get as gifts and aren't even used" and you know he apparently hasn't changed his tune on flash-based players at all. So what are the odds that Apple really has a flashPod almost ready for prime time?

Okay, sure, since Apple doesn't have a flash-based player out yet, it behooves Apple to slam them now to sell as many current iPods as possible. And we suppose that if Apple does introduce a flash player of its own, Steve can say, "yes, we know we said all the flash players out there were useless. That's why we decided to make one that's good." So a flashPod isn't out of the question, but it's a big "if" on which to hang such a high stock price. Just in case the rumors aren't true, here's hoping that Wall Street hasn't read too much into them when inflating Apple's stock price, or else we'll all have to assume crash positions yet again...

Remember yesterday when we posited that a certain Apple-bashing industry pundit had written and posted an entire article predicated on an easily-refuted factual falsehood and sneakily amended it later to be predicated on a slightly less egregious but still easily-refuted factual falsehood? Well, for what it's worth, Shawn King of Your Mac Life was kind enough to confirm that, yes, John Dvorak's recent article about the U2 iPod did originally claim that the unit shipped with over 400 U2 songs on its hard drive and was edited when somebody apparently clued him in to a little thing called "reading product specs." (As of broadcast time, the current version still claims that the songs are bundled with the iPod for free-- which they aren't-- but a few paragraphs in it "clarifies" that they aren't preloaded on the hard drive and have to be downloaded.) While we suppose it's possible that Shawn and the AtAT staff are experiencing tandem hallucinations, we consider it unlikely; otherwise he'd devote a lot more of his shows ranting about the tiny mind-controlling pig-men that walk through walls.

Now, we don't want to turn this into a generic rant about the sorry state of journalism today, but the fact is that Dvorak obviously didn't take the time to read even the press release for the U2 iPod before he wrote his latest screed, let alone the actual product pages, because nowhere does Apple even vaguely imply that the product comes bundled with "The Complete U2." So when faithful viewer sinjin forwarded us another article that appeared to be written around a similar sort of factual inaccuracy, this time in Technology Review, we were all geared up to whine about that one as well. See, this new article strongly implies that Macs are under attack by a real, live virus right now, but it's talking about "Opener," which, as we made pretty clear last week, was in no way, shape, or form actually a virus.

To be fair, the author never outright calls the "Opener" malware a virus, but he certainly implies that it is. In addition to frequent mentions of Windows "virus attacks" for context, he claims that Opener "embeds itself onto Macs running OS X" and hints that the Mac community had to "respond quickly to address the Opener threat," as if this was Outbreak and anyone with a Mac needed to don a biohazard suit before the monkey started biting people. As we said a week ago, it was clear that Opener couldn't "embed itself" onto anything; even Opener's developers acknowledged that it needed to be installed manually by someone with admin access or physical access before it could do anything at all, and it had no vector of spread.

So despite the fact that whether Opener is actually a virus or not doesn't change the thrust of the Tech Review article (namely, that the development of Mac malware should be taken as a positive sign of the Mac market's growth and increasing visibility), we were all ready to debunk the "Opener as virus" implication into a tiny smear on the asphalt, because we didn't want Mac users panicking over nothing. But then we did something that John Dvorak forgot to do-- we checked our facts.

See, a week is a really long time in high tech, and while Opener appeared to be an inert script back then, MacInTouch now has reports from three readers who have found Opener installed on their Macs, despite using firewalls and being "behind locked doors"-- so apparently this thing is spreading somehow, maybe in a trojan installer of some sort. McAfee has also since classified Opener as a worm, claiming that it "tries to spread via shares," presumably because it turns on File Sharing in hopes that connected users will download the script and try to run it themselves. Three affected users isn't exactly an epidemic, but it's more than enough reason to watch the skies; we recommend keeping an eye on the MacInTouch report until people figure out how Opener is insinuating itself onto random Macs out there.

Lessons to learn: 1) things change; 2) paranoia is your friend; and 3) John Dvorak is still a massive tool. But you probably already knew at least that last one.

Tangent time! Like we said, not much is shaking Apple-wise right now, so it's nice that Steve has another job that we can occasionally mine for drama nuggets. We speak, of course, of his CEOship of Pixar, which, as you all know, has left him hovering at the periphery of the oh-my-lord-can-you-believe-this-is-still-going-on Disney CEO crisis for the past ten or twelve decades. The last thing we want to do is retread all that nonsense to bring you back up to speed, but here's the Stick Figure Theater version sans the stick figures:

Disney CEO Michael Eisner hates Steve Jobs; Steve hates Eisner; Eisner hates Disney board member and nephew-o'-Walt Roy Disney; Roy hates Eisner; Eisner gets Roy tossed from the board after calling both Roy and Steve "Shiite Muslims"; Roy tries to get shareholders to toss Eisner out; Steve cancels Pixar-Disney negotiations just in time to make Eisner look bad; Eisner receives the biggest vote of no confidence from shareholders in history; Eisner is removed as chairman but stays on as CEO; Eisner finally decides to "retire" come September of 2006.

Needless to say, Eisner leaving at the end of summer the year after next isn't nearly soon enough for Roy and his merry brigade of Eisner-despiseners, and he's still trying to get the Disney board to boot the guy posthaste, but in the meantime, the board is taking its own sweet time sniffing out Eisner's successor to the throne at the Magic Kingdom. Naturally, that's opened the door for every pundit and his pundit grandmother to offer suggestions, and billionaire Steve "Mr. Flat Tax" Forbes is evidently no exception. (Whether or not his grandmother posts a rebuttal remains to be seen.)

As pointed out by faithful viewer Pedro Henriquez, an article by Steve Forbes oddly dated "11.15.04" (apparently when you're that rich, time travel ain't no thang) mentions that Disney's CEO-huntin' board "couldn't do better than to go all out to tap Steve Jobs, cofounder and CEO of Apple Computer and CEO of Pixar." Forbes cites Steve's unparalleled knowledge of high tech, Hollywood, finances, and "the critical importance of creativity," something that hasn't been overly evident in the current Disney regime. And since it's only a matter of time before video and movies are distributed at high volumes over the Internet (he means legally, BitTorrent-boy) just like music is starting to be, who better to have helming the U.S.S. Disney than the guy who got the first successful music downloading service hashed out and up and running?

Of course, the biggest monkey wrench in that beautiful dream is that Steve is already just a leetle bit busy running Pixar and Apple, but Forbes insists that Steve is "enormously creative and energetic" enough to "head Disney and be, as he is now, Apple's guiding spirit." Toss a "Pixar gets bought by Disney, after which Pixarians come in and take over all of Disney from the inside just like the NeXTians did when Apple bought NeXT" scenario in there and it just may be possible. Dare to dream!