All is not well in the Magic Kingdom, and the more we hear about Disney's continuing nightmare in the boardroom, the more we suspect that this topic might soon become more than just slightly on-topic here before long. If you're just tuning in, Disney board member (and nephew of Walt's cryonically-frozen head) Roy Disney was recently ousted by CEO Michael Eisner and his Pack o' Thugs™, ostensibly because Roy was past Disney's mandatory retirement age. However, board member Stanley Gold accused Eisner of canning Roy only because the guy was too critical of Eisner's lousy performance; Stan then resigned in disgust. Ooooo, it's like Dynasty! Except maybe without the steely gaze of John Forsythe.

Now, so far, the only connection this mess has to Apple is Stan's incidental allegation that, while badmouthing Stan and Roy, Eisner also called Steve Jobs a "Shiite Muslim" in reference to his "extreme" views. It's pretty random, we know, but hey, we take what we can get-- even though with Eisner, namecalling sounds more like a behavioral rule than an exception. (Faithful viewer Ray Kloss points out that the New York Post is following the boardroom collapse in Mouseville, and reports that one "insider" insists that Eisner disliked Roy Disney thoroughly enough to have referred to him as "the idiot nephew." So much for respecting one's elders.) At the time we mentioned that Steve's name coming up was probably just due to tensions at those ongoing Pixar negotiations, but we wouldn't write off the slim possibility that Eisner was fearing for his job. CEOs-- smart ones, anyway-- start to get nervous career-wise when Jobs is skulking around.

Well, it's starting to look like maybe our fanciful "Eisner on the run" scenario wasn't too far off the mark after all. According to the Post, Disney might well be feeling a little pressure from shareholders to put some freakin' leadership in place, either by filling the ten-years-vacant position of president or at least by patching the gaping holes now left in its board of directors. And guess who "Hollywood rumors" name as Wall Street's and Tinseltown's "most welcome" choice to become the new Disney Prez? That's right, the Stevester: front-runner to be Disney's "second-in-charge and nominal successor to Eisner." Holy swiveling 2D circular mouse ears, Batman!

Stranger things have happened. Reportedly "speculation that the Disney Co. would be forced to offer Jobs a position-- if only a seat on the board-- intensified" as Roy and Stanley vacated the premises early in the week. See, Disney has become increasingly dependent on Pixar-derived profits in recent years (well over a billion bucks, we're told), but the Disney-Pixar contract ends in 2005 and Steve is currently shopping around for better partnerships, so he's got a lot of hand right now. Given that investors are probably already looking askance at Disney's current state of upheaval, losing Pixar might well plunge Disney's stock price so far down through the earth's core that Satan will be using it as a spoon-rest. And you all know Steve; if he accepts the Disney presidency, Eisner would likely be gone so fast he'd leave a small sonic boom in his wake.

Heck, even with only a seat on the board it'd probably be a simple matter for Steve to pull another Amelio. No wonder Eisner's spooked; he's about three bad days away from "Would you like fries with that?"

Other than blindingly entertaining boardroom melodrama at Disney, things are surprisingly quiet in Macville right now. Why "surprisingly," you ask? Because Macworld Expo is only a month away, we answer, and frankly, we'd have expected some serious pre-Stevenote speculation to be building nicely by now. (Yes, we're well aware that IDG still hasn't actually listed who's going to do the keynote, but the keynote page refers to "high-powered luminaries that set the pace for the future of the Mac OS platform," so it must be Steve. Or maybe the Noise Boys. Nothing sets the pace for the Mac's future like a Swedish barbershop quartet, baby.)

Oh, sure, there have been little trickles of rumor dribbling around here and there, but MacRumors does its usual excellent job of summarizing pre-Expo speculation, and the bottom line is that it's all still pretty darn thin right now. For example, take the Xserve; "no reports specifically place the Xserve at Macworld SF," but MacRumors had to include it as a Stevenote possibility anyway on the sole basis that "G5 updates are long overdue." New LCD displays are on the list merely due to "unconfirmed hints" from unidentified sources suggesting that the line "should see revisions" in January, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence. And there's a catch-all mention that January will bring the Mac's 20th anniversary, so maybe there's going to be something so insanely great that just seeing it will cause your eyelids to smoke-- although there are no rumors whatsoever predicting anything specific for the occasion. In short, MacRumors pulled together what's out there-- and what's out there is a huge honkin' truckload of not freakin' much.

To put it bluntly, the situation as we see it is pretty dire. By thirty days before a Stevenote we generally expect at least a dozen or so highly-visible and well-formed rumors sprouting up around the 'net predicting specific new products, complete with listed specs and pricing. Granted, we also expect a third of those rumors obviously to be a direct results of the alarming resurgence in LSD use in this country, and the remaining two-thirds to have been blatantly plagiarized from the first handful of acid-trip scribblings, but hey, that's what makes it fun, Skeeter. So what it boils down to is this: you people just aren't making up nearly enough stuff. Shame on you. What, is it the economy? Drugs too expensive these days? We're trying to understand, here.

There's at least one saving grace, though: MacRumors notes "recent rumors" that "suggest that Power Macs will see updates in January, possibly bringing significant speed bumps"-- and then, as faithful viewer Paul Ferro points out, AppleInsider jumps in with the specifics. Reportedly IBM has just "begun the process of fabricating 90-nanometer G5s in volume," with speeds running at 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6 GHz and yields as good as those for the existing 130-nanometer 1.6/1.8/2.0 GHz processors that have populated Apple's Power Macs since summer. Apple is said to be expecting its first shipment of the new chips "sometime in the month of January," opening the door for a product intro at the Stevenote with actual systems shipping in February or March.

The only problem with that rumor is that it's so reasonable it might actually be true. C'mon, folks, get with the program-- we're drowning, here! You know, Cringely had that rumor about Apple tablet devices shipping as early as next month-- maybe you can write and find out what he's smoking...

As for rumors that look well past next month's Macworld Expo, do you remember yesterday's whispers about Apple allegedly working on "a product that will allow users to videoconference with friends wirelessly from the palm of their hand"? Sounds kinda far-fetched, right? After all, such a product would be doomed to failure unless it worked pretty much anywhere you take it, so it couldn't rely on WiFi hotspots or anything like that; it'd have to build off of cellular technology or something in order to have the sort of coverage necessary for people ever to want to lay out several hundred clams for what amounts to a video cell phone.

And while "3G" wireless technology made a lot of promises, personal experience and the anecdotes of others strongly imply that it was really padding its résumé something fierce. Our experience with the stuff is limited to two services, but based on what we've seen, we can offer the following observation in good conscience: out here in the Boston area, at least, Sprint PCS Vision feels like dialup, and a GPRS connection from T-Mobile feels like slightly crappy dialup. That's not to say they aren't good services; personally, we think surfing the 'net at dialup-class speeds from anywhere you can make a mobile phone call is at least eight kinds of nifty. But it doesn't sound terribly ideal for portable videoconferencing-- at least, not at a quality that Apple would actually want to ship.

But what's this? The PowerPage claims that "Apple will release a wireless laptop card/solution that will run on AT&T's high-speed EDGE Network." According to AT&T, the company "more than tripled the speed of its GPRS wireless data network" and EDGE is the result, providing "burst speeds up to 200 Kbps and average speeds of 100-130 Kbps." Generally speaking you can always ignore "burst" numbers as pipe dreams written by a marketing drone with a sick sense of humor, but an average speed of 100-130 kilobits per second isn't half bad; if it's true, than EDGE is two or three times as fast as a typical dialup modem connection-- not jaw-droppingly terrific, but a step in the right direction.

The PowerPage specifically mentions a "laptop" solution instead of any sort of handheld iChat device, so if it's real, this is probably going to be marketed as an offshoot of AirPort-- "AirPort Everywhere," as opposed to AirPort Extreme, or something like that. But the handheld video thingy is rumored to be a couple of years away, and there's nothing all that far-fetched about Apple building an iPod-type device that packs a battery, a tiny color screen, a mobile-phone-style camera, and an EDGE-compatible wireless card.

Heck, Apple could build something like that tomorrow, and now that we think about it, the company could probably even make it work with non-EDGE data services. The only reason that iChat AV demands a broadband connection for videoconferencing is because the application has such high standards for video quality-- but the current iPod has a screen resolution of only 160x128; existing cellular data services could carry two-way video that small, even in color and at a reasonable frame rate.

Aaaaand this is the point where we suddenly realize that we're taking a couple of completely unsubstantiated rumors way, way too seriously. Hey, an anonymous guy with really poor spelling just emailed us claiming to be a "vise presedent" at Apple and informed us that the company plans to ship a programmable robotic rhino next week, and it can fly and speak in Klingon-- so expect detailed analysis of weight-versus-thrust ratios and linguistic AI strategies when you tune in tomorrow. Apparently this is what we do now. Who knew?