If we at AtAT have one finely-honed survival skill that helps us endure the harshnesses of our modern technological society, it's this: the power of self-delusion. That's right-- collectively we can harness a tremendous willingness to believe in (and wait for) products that haven't even been announced yet. Now, the ability to wait for progress that's due to appear "real soon now" is a skill not unknown to most of the Mac faithful, who taxed their "optimistic patience" muscles to the extreme during Apple's bad patch a few years back; it was the Mac users without the requisite patience who succumbed to the power of the Dark Side. But what we're talking about goes way beyond that. For example, we're still holding out hope for an Apple-branded handheld computer.

Amazing, isn't it? Steve canned the Newton almost two years ago and told us all that a new Apple handheld replacement would appear sometime in 1999. The closest thing we got was the iBook, which, while it can indeed be held in one hand, isn't exactly what we were hoping for on that front. And yet, here we are-- still waiting, still keeping a glimmer of hope alive by virtue of little rumors that surface from time to time. That's right, we're still holding out hope for that long-fabled Apple-branded Palm device. After all, as faithful viewer Johnny 2000 points out, The Register claims the rollout's due "in the very near future." In fact, their sources report that friends-of-friends have seen "early Apple-branded Palm-style devices in limited production," and even Steve himself dropped a big public hint when he introduced the Palm CEO during last week's keynote address: "We've been doing a lot of work with these guys lately."

And so we wait-- or, at least, some of us do. Katie, AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae, has been PDAing with a Palm V since Christmas, and digs it to the fullest. Yours Truly, on the other hand, is content to wait and see what innovations Apple will bring to the platform. Especially since, as faithful viewer Rich Lindsay notes, Apple just registered the domain name newton.com this past October; currently, loading up www.newton.com simply brings up Apple's home page, but we can't help but wonder just what Apple's got up its big, roomy sleeves...