Well, with just twenty-four hours to go, there's still absolutely zero mention of any Apple press event either at the company's web site or in the online calendar of the Flint Center where this whole brouhaha is allegedly taking place, but we here at AtAT have decided to ignore those trifling facts studiously and with extreme prejudice-- which means we're just a day away from our latest dose of Stevular bliss. (Woo-hoo!! Ain't denial grand?) And so, as the clock ticks away the seconds until Uncle Steve takes the stage and summons forth new iBooks as if from nowhere (yes, we're still taking that completely for granted at this point; reckless shmeckless, we're feeling saucy today), the frequency of rumorlicious tidbits working their way through the Silicon Curtain continues to increase.

As faithful viewer David Poller notes, AppleInsider has finally kicked in its two cents on the imminent consumer portable code-named "Marble": apparently we can expect an iBook "about as thin as the titanium G4 PowerBook" that "may feature the same color and make of titanium shell" as well. So much for the outside. Under the hood, there's a 500 MHz G3 on a 100 MHz bus, an 8 MB ATI RageM3 graphics chipset, a 10 GB hard drive, and either 64 MB or 128 MB of RAM, depending on configuration. Rounding out the feature set are 2 USB ports, a single FireWire port, the ubiquitous Ethernet and modem jacks, and either a CD-RW drive or a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive-- again, depending on which config you toss in the cart. Oh, and chalk up one more source expecting a 12.1-inch screen, but running at 1024x768 resolution.

Now, given AppleInsider's track record of late (the "combo drive iMac" prediction, the "G4 iMac" story, the recent "iPhoto Studio" mess, etc.), we wouldn't be surprised if you're reluctant to embrace AI's iBook specs as gospel. But it's worth mentioning that-- and take this entirely as you see fit-- the specs recently posted to Mac OS Rumors are mostly in agreement. MOSR adds a few more interesting details, such as news that Marble will most likely sport an all-aluminum enclosure available in several anodized colors, stereo speakers, and possibly even an honest-to-goodness VGA port supporting spanning (not just mirroring) on a second monitor.

Sadly, neither site addresses the most shocking allegation recently published over at Go2Mac: that Marble's price will start at a crowd-pleasing $999. And if sites who have predicted such way-out Criswell-style wackiness as an Apple-PowerPC buyout and what could only be a mouse for dogs won't touch that pipe-dream price point with a ten foot pole, we're mentally filing it squarely in the "wishful thinking" category and leaving ourselves open for a really pleasant surprise-- not to mention rioting in the streets if word gets out that consumers can take home an iBook for under a grand.