The "Son of Pismo" speculation just keeps getting better, thanks to "refinements" of the notion by the people who opened this juicy can of worms in the first place: the good folks over at Go2Mac. In fact, while we're still maintaining a healthy skepticism, Go2Mac has poked, prodded, and pummelled the Son of Pismo scenario into a sort of Grand Unified Portable Theory that eliminates one of our biggest objections-- namely, the "three Mac portables" bugaboo. For you see, now word has it that Son of Pismo will in fact be released not as a "middleBook," but as a new iBook.

We know, we know-- Apple just released new iBooks last month, and a two-month product refresh cycle would imply that Apple's product managers are in dire need of a nap. However, Go2Mac is insisting that when Steve Jobs takes the stage four weeks from today, he'll announce that iBook customers will have a choice when it comes to screen size: 12.1 inches for those who crave ultraportability, or 14.1 inches for people who prefer a heftier display. And according to Go2Mac's insider info, that iBook with the 14.1-inch screen is actually Son of Pismo. So in that scenario, there's no "middleBook", just PowerBooks for the pros and iBooks for the consumers-- albeit iBooks with a choice of screen sizes.

So do we believe it? Well, frankly, no. Sure, it fits in with that Alpha Top exec that blabbed to the press about a new "wider-screen" iBook in production for July, but remember, Apple flat-out denied that claim. And we still think it's pretty unlikely that just two months after touting the compactness of the current iBook, Apple would turn around and add a completely new enclosure to the line. So far Apple has wisely used one enclosure per product, thus avoiding confusing the bejeezus out of the customers and the press alike, and we just can't see them changing gears now.

And for those of you still trying to decide whether or not Go2Mac constitutes a trustworthy source for this rumor, we'd be remiss if we failed to point out the site's claim of color choices for these new Expo iBooks: "Pearl, Metallic Silver, Aqua, Bohemian Blue, Orange Sherbet, and Taupe." We're really hoping our irony detectors are on the fritz and this is just a joke, because otherwise somebody's smoking the Wacky Tobacky, and it ain't us. Pearl, we get. Fine. But "Metallic Silver"? Forgive our ignorance, but what exactly constitutes non-metallic silver? And more importantly, why Taupe? Taupe is brownish-grey; is Apple going beige on us again? Lord almighty, we can see the riots already...

Brace yourselves, folks, because this is going to come as a terrible shock. You already know that Mac OS X is lacking on a number of fronts (DVD playback, solid audio support, a high-level input device API like Game Sprockets, etc.) but most of the holes will get filled in over time. There is, however, one omission that's apparently going to stay unfilled for the forseeable future; according to a MacCentral article, "telephony is dead on the Mac." Bing Software (the makers of such Mac telephony products as MegaPhone and PhonePro) spoke to Apple about adding the necessary hooks to Mac OS X, but reportedly Apple responded that "telephony was no longer an interest to them not their customer base." Consternation! Uproar!

Or maybe, not so much. We wouldn't be surprised if most of you are still scratching your heads and asking, "What's telephony?" Basically, it involves plugging your phone line into your Mac and running software that lets you use your computer as a speakerphone, answering machine, etc. It's entirely possible that Apple is correct, and that the vast majority of Mac users would rather talk into an actual telephone than into their computers; we can't speak for everybody, but personally we're having a tough time getting particularly upset about this development (or, rather, lack of same), no matter how well telephony might seem to fit into the whole "digital hub" picture.

Back when we were still giddy with the blazing speed of the 200 MHz 604e in our brand-spankin'-new PowerTower Pro, we actually did get a hold of Apple's GeoPort Telecom Adapter, also referred to as the "Pod." Most people who used a Pod used it strictly as a 28.8 Kbps software-based modem (albeit one with, we eventually discovered, a much slower effective connection that a real hardware modem). Its less-publicized use, though, was for telephony applications, and for a while we experimented with using our PowerTower as a combination speakerphone, answering service, and fax machine, all via the Pod and Apple's bundled software. It was kind of cool, in much the same way that one's first exposure to Speakable Items is kind of cool-- but it got old pretty quickly. To be honest, once the "wow factor" wore off, it was a bigger hassle sitting down in front of the Mac and using the software than it was to pick up the phone or hit the "new messages" button on our decidedly low-tech answering machine.

Don't get us wrong; if you'd like to run telephony apps on your Mac, we'd like you to have the option to do so. But if this is a matter of priorities over at Apple, and telephony's just waaaay down on the development list under stuff like "DVD playback" and "a Finder that's faster than a snail on Quaaludes," then Apple's probably made the right choice for the time being. And anyway, is Apple down on telephony? Don't forget, Apple went so far as to register IPHONE.ORG, a domain name that's been pointing to Apple's own home page for the past year and a half. We're guessing that Apple thinks its customers would rather focus on Internet telephony (i.e. phone calls for free over the 'net) than anything involving landline phones. Just a thought, though.

Speaking of Mac OS X, you can number the AtAT staff among those who used to find the operating system's listed requirements just a teensy bit on the heavy side; needing a Mac that originally shipped with at least a G3 doesn't bother us terribly, since we fully understand that Apple can only support so much hardware just out of the gate. But the 128 MB RAM requirement has always given us pause, even though extra RAM is so cheap these days. There's still something that bugs us about an operating system that needs four times the base RAM of an iBook that shipped a year and a half ago. (Heck, even today's base-model iBook only ships with 64 MB of RAM-- and Mac OS X is preloaded on its hard drive.)

On second thought, though, we have run Mac OS X on a PowerBook with only 64 MB of RAM, and it performed pretty well-- at least until we started running Classic apps. So at least Apple's posted requirements are realistic, and possibly even slightly on the cautious side, despite the fact that Mac OS X will happily chew up as much RAM as you can throw it. Now, Microsoft's requirements, on the other hand, seem to be a different matter altogether. We had a friend once who actually tried to run Windows 95 on a 486 with the bare minimum listed RAM and hard drive space just to see what would happen, and the results would have been comical if they hadn't been so utterly sad. (We're hoping he shot that 486 out behind the woodshed to put it out of its misery.) So what are we to make of the expected requirements for this fall's Windows XP?

The corporate line is that any Wintel purchased "from late 1999 onward" should be just fine for Windows XP; note that Mac OS X supports Macs built a couple of years earlier, so the next time you're complaining about how Apple's latest OS isn't supported on your Power Mac 9600, remember that things could be worse. Moreover, according to a ZDNet article forwarded to us by faithful viewer Dale Rodgie, Gartner analyst Michael Silver thinks Microsoft's official requirements are bunk; "you want to avoid installing Windows XP on a system more than a year old," says he. (Personally, we want to avoid installing Windows XP altogether, but hey, to each his own.)

And whereas right now Microsoft claims that a "300 MHz Pentium II processor and 128 MB of RAM" is "all" that's required to run current builds, "the final version of Windows XP is expected to carry more stringent requirements." How stringent? Well, Mike thinks that Microsoft's late-1999-hardware recommendation is "a little aggressive" and that a 650-800 MHz Pentium III is a more realistic minimum. Oh, and about that 128 MB of RAM-- Mike recommends that "households sharing a single PC might want to start with a minimum 256 MB of memory." Yikes! Again, we realize that RAM is cheap, but Jiminy Christmas, that sounds awfully high to us. Suddenly Apple's "1997-and-onwards G3- and G4-based Macs with 128 MB of RAM" sounds positively generous.