Uh-oh-- Macworld Expo's less than a month away, and you know what that means: rumors galore! This is the most enjoyable time of the year for avid Apple watchers; forget about that Christmas and New Year's nonsense, because the real festivities involve watching the rumors sites work up a sweat trying to keep up with the deluge of speculation swirling around the 'net. And while the rest of your friends think they have it tough trying to decide what kind of fruitcake to send to Aunt Freda or which swanky "millennium" celebration to get plastered at, you're giddily trying to pick which Mac rumors to believe before Steve saunters out on stage and reveals the truth on January 5th. Does it get any better than this?

So if you've been keeping up with it all, you know that we've got a veritable plethora of Repeat Rumors this time around. Or, if not a plethora, it's at least an abundance. Well, okay, it's more like two or three. But these rumors are big, folks-- because they deal with bigness. Apple Insider's revived the rumor of a new iMac with a 17" display. Mac OS Rumors trots out the old saw about a "professional" keyboard and mouse for the Power Macs, which still ship with the iMac's mini-keyboard and hockey puck. The skeptics among you may scoff at these rumors, and who could blame you? You've heard them over and over again for well over a year, and nothing's come to pass. (AppleLinks, for one, is sick of Lucy pulling away the football.) But it's the holidays, so the more trusting among you can be forgiven if you find yourself dreaming not of dancing sugarplums, but of chunkier iMacs and full-size keyboards.

As for your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, there's no way we'd ever dismiss any rumor out of hand; heck, we're far too wide-eyed with wonder for that. We wouldn't be surprised if Apple "super-sizes" its input devices for the Power Macs, since criticism of the iMac's keyboard and mouse is nearly unanimous in scope. As for a bigger, beefier iMac, hey, why not? The new iMacs aren't faring nearly as well as we (and, presumably, Apple) had hoped, so making it bigger and bulkier is a natural move. Bigger is better; it's a fundamental rule of the American consumer process. That's why the Newton completely kicked the Palm's butt in the handheld marketpla-- er, never mind. But the main reason we're a little doubtful about the 17" iMac is this: if such a machine existed, and it included FireWire for high-speed peripheral expansion, professionals like us (hey, stop sniggering!) would have almost no reason to buy a Power Mac instead. But we can certainly keep our fingers crossed. Meanwhile, a jolly old elf named Steve may well be chuckling merrily at all the disinformation he's managed to spread...

One of the other rumors that we keep coming across is that Sears, that bastion of customer service and competitive pricing, may soon start carrying Apple's professional-level Macs as well as the iGoods the chain already sells. (Actually, if still more rumors can be believed, perhaps that should say "the chain already fails to sell." All is reportedly not well in Searsville.) Most recently, O'Grady's PowerPage reported on the possibility of PowerBooks showing up in Sears as early as a couple of months from now.

Does that prospect worry you as much as it does us? Buying anything from Sears can only be described as a "baffling ordeal" (why won't they add actual check-out counters?), and if the average snoozing salesperson can't even sell Apple's lower-cost, brightly-colored, consumer-targeted Macs to Sears' decidedly consumeresque clientele, what are the chances that somebody looking for a PowerBook G3 is really going to want to buy one at Sears? The price would be higher than anywhere else (except in special sale situations), the salespeople would likely be no help at all, and there's the added peril of having to fend off rabid store representatives guarding the entrances and ready to pounce on the unwary to sign them up for Sears charge cards. We'll stick with mail order, thank you very much.

We're not saying that PowerBooks won't be offered in Sears-- after all, it's not like Apple's never made a bonehead business decision before-- but we consider it an extremely unlikely scenario. We put it right up there with the likelihood of new multi-processor G4 servers being sold in 7-11. "Gimme a Big Gulp, one o' them there rotating hot dogs, and a G4 with relish and cheese. And a scratch ticket."

We don't know about you, but for us, occasionally the holiday season throws us a curve in the form of a mild moral dilemma. As you may possibly have realized, we are not fond of Microsoft. The company's products are getting more bug-ridden, bloated, and complex over the years, and its business practices would make a robber baron weep with shame. But we love buying gifts for our friends and relatives, and this year, a good friend has his eye set on Microsoft's new IntelliMouse Explorer-- so the question becomes, will we give Microsoft our hard-earned money, or not?

Have you seen this new mouse? It looks pretty cool-- it uses optical sensors instead of a rolling ball to track motion, which means it should never skip or need cleaning. We at AtAT have an old-style optical mouse kicking around here somewhere, but Microsoft's jobbie doesn't need a special mouse pad to work. As far as we can tell, the IntelliMouse Explorer is an honest-to-goodness example of actual Microsoft innovation. Really! You could have knocked us over with a feather. Now, the Explorer probably isn't for us: we personally aren't fond of "handed" mice (we prefer symmetry), we've heard a few hardcore gamers say the Explorer is a bit sketchy (though other gamers rave about it), and we just have to wonder about the placement of the two thumb buttons (do you really want even one button under the only opposable digit gripping the mouse itself?). But we haven't tried it, so we won't knock it. Most people seem to love the thing. And we think it glows bright red.

The question then becomes, what are the moral ramifications for giving yet more money to the world's richest man, whose lack of ethics we condemn? The last really good piece of Microsoft software we ever bought was Word 5.1. Remember that? A full install was maybe 8 MB. These days Word 98 requires a minimum of 33 MB, with an "Easy Install" taking up 56 MB. (We had to find that out from Outpost.com, since Microsoft's Word 98 Pricing and System Requirements page was blank when we checked.) You want the true definition of bloatware? The IntelliMouse Explorer requires 30 MB of hard disk space on Windows systems. A mouse. 30 MB. (Mac users only need 15 MB.) What gives? We've officially gotten to the point where you can't put on a Microsoft t-shirt without having 20 MB of free space on your boot disk.

But our friend wants that mouse, and so we'll probably get it for him, obscene system requirements notwithstanding. As for feeling bad about giving money to Bill Gates, we did a little math and we feel a bit better about it now. If His Billness is worth $100 billion, even if he personally gets the entire $69.95 we'd be paying for the mouse, that's 6.995 E-8 % of his total worth. Relatively speaking, that's equivalent to him giving us two hundredths of a penny-- and that's being very optimistic when estimating our net worth. So we clicked on the "Buy Now" button on the IntelliMouse Explorer page... only to get an error message: "We are sorry, but no data exists for that product ID. You may continue to browse the site." Figures...