Still waiting for a new Apple handheld computer to replace the long-dead Newton? Well, believe it or not, you're not the only one. As faithful viewer Eric Wright reports, there's a nifty CNBC article about how Apple's stock remains a stellar buy right now, due to the company's massive piles of cash and the possibility of Great Things™ in the future, driven in part by the recent release of Mac OS X. That's not news; anyone who has glanced at the numbers knows that AAPL at $20 is a steal (which is why we here at AtAT are now the proud recipients of our very first Apple shareholders' voting thingy). What may be news is that at least one analyst still thinks Apple will eventually ship a PDA.

The key word here, however, is "eventually." Skip to the bottom of the article to see what James Keller, a mutual fund research analyst and eternal optimist, says about the prospects of an Apple handheld: "I don't know if it will be in a year, or eighteen months, but eventually we will see a new PDA from Apple. And when that happens, I fully expect that the most exciting personal computer company on the planet will have the most exciting PDA on the planet." Okay, so he's given his prediction a whole lot of chronological padding, there, but if Apple really does want to re-enter the handheld market, we'd hope that the company wouldn't wait another year and a half to do it. By then the PDA market might be just as saturated as the personal computer market seems to be now.

On second thought, given the current state of the economy, maybe Apple should wait until consumers are ready to start buying expensive toys again. A quick glance at, say, Palm's stock price should be enough to make any prospective PDA player blanch at the prospect of leaping into the fray now. But this is all just wild speculation anyway, since Keller's PDA prediction is apparently based on nothing more than his (admittedly impeccable) premise that Apple cranks out insanely great stuff. And any company that cranks out insanely great stuff must eventually produce an insanely great PDA, right? Here's our suggestion for Apple: hire an infinite number of monkeys, lock them in a room with a bunch of typewriters and a copy of Palm For Dummies, and eventually they'll slide the perfect PDA under the door along with a copy of Hamlet.