Here we are at the end of another Macworld Expo week, and you know what that means: Info Drought. You've seen it time and time again; whenever Steve delivers one of his famous keynotes, the Mac media manages to swamp itself with about eleventy-kajillion stories covering the same exact info, and that leads to a couple of problems. First comes the glut. Really, how many different articles do we need to tell us that the iBook's RAM just doubled? We figure eight or nine should be sufficient to cover all the angles and capture the various subtle nuances of that complex announcement. Sixty, on the other hand, just might be overkill. The second problem is what happens when all the Mac journalists are spent, following that post-keynote reporting binge; there's no news, and even if there were, no one's got the energy to write about it. And that's where we are now. Welcome to the dust bowl.

So given the current slack pace of Apple's unfolding drama, you'll forgive us if we reach back a bit and talk about something we didn't get a chance to discuss before, due to our mad dash to read a dozen wildly different descriptions of the G4 speed bump. There's one rumor in the Apple world that's kept resurfacing even since Apple's stock price reached about $80 a share last September: that AAPL would split. We hadn't even seen any concrete evidence of such a move, though-- until Tuesday night. That was when, according to a Reuters story, Apple indicated that when the annual shareholders meeting rolls around in April, the company will ask the stockholders for permission to boost its number of shares from 320 million to 900 million. If the investors give the go-ahead, Apple could pull a two-for-one stock split as part of the expansion.

Being financial ignoramuses (ignorami?), we're not going to pretend to understand either the motives or the effects of such a move, but we're assured that, in the eyes of the stockholders, a split is commonly considered a Good Thing™, since it indicates that the company thinks the share price will continue to rise. As for motive, we figure that doubling the amount of shares is probably important since Apple's currently handing out stock options like they're cheap logo pens at a trade show. Remember, in an attempt to bring a "startup" feeling back to Apple, Uncle Steve gave stock options a hefty role in the whole employee compensation gig. And hey, don't forget that Steve himself was granted options for ten million shares back when the Board of Directors gave him that jet-- those gotta come from somewhere, right?