Not all traditions are warm and fuzzy, but at least the painful ones hold the potential for high drama. In recent months it's become customary (sad as that may be) for Steve Jobs to assemble his minions and "talk things out" following an earnings warning or a disappointing quarter. These so-called "communications meetings" provide an open forum in which concerned employees can ask questions, and Steve can answer them while bombarding the entire Apple workforce with Reality Distortion Field energy tuned to minimize resignations at a time when employee stock options are about as appealing as a coupon for a free stabbing and compound limb fracture at any area Walmart.

Now, since the circumstances necessitating the third and most recent communications meeting are particularly frightful-- it's tough to laugh off an expected $250 million quarterly loss-- we were rather hoping that some real fireworks might have erupted during Uncle Steve's Pacification Ceremony. At the very least, we figured that scads of questions from frightened employees might lead Steve to reveal a little something secret about Apple's upcoming plans, which might then in turn be leaked by any aspiring Worker Bees still in Apple's employ. So it was with a hopeful eye that we cast our glance towards The Register's mole-leaked coverage of the inner-sanctum event... only to be woefully disappointed.

What we found was a quote from Steve regarding Apple's mishandling of the education market: "We screwed up in education... Dell didn't earn the crown-- we gave it to them." We also noted Steve's insistence that Apple is "working really hard to clear the channel for several new products over the next several months." He also alluded to two upcoming "iMovie-like" applications (though he declined to elaborate), and talked about the company "missing the boat" on CD-RW. Tossed together lightly and served hot, those nuggets might have made a tasty meal; unfortunately, it's really all just warmed-over leftovers from Steve's conference call a couple of days ago. Why on earth would Apple moles leak information we can all hear for ourselves via the magic of QuickTime?

Sadly, it seems that Go2Mac's coverage of the meeting is almost as bare, but starving for scraps as we were, we pounced upon the one potentially new bit of information in the lot: reportedly Steve "alluded to a totally new product category being announced soon." While that's probably just the portable analog of the Cube, which everyone and his grandmother has been expecting ever since Steve expanded Apple's product grid to six squares last summer, the news that it'll be announced "soon" at least gives us hope that we'll see something very new come next month's Stevenote. Hey, it's something, right?