And the "new portable" debate rages on. Ever since somebody at Alpha Top (one of Apple's Taiwanese manufacturing partners) blabbed about what he claimed to be a new new iBook due in July and boasting a "wider screen" and "a variety of colors," speculation has been running rampant. For its part, Apple flat-out denied the reports of a July iBook Surprise, publicly and officially stating that the reports were "incorrect" and "not true"; that just led Apple-watchers to ponder what Alpha Top's wider-LCD, comes-in-colors, non-iBook product really is. Most people figure it's a slightly updated PowerBook G4. Some think it's the new LCD-based iMac, instead. And then Go2Mac made the bold claim that it's actually a third Mac portable which it's calling "Son of Pismo." Dizzy yet?

Well, as faithful viewer Jay R. of Macaholics Anonymous points out, Go2Mac hasn't dropped the "Son of Pismo" assertion yet, and continues to posit that Apple is preparing to offer a third laptop that is essentially last year's Pismo PowerBook decked out in updated threads more befitting a 2001 Apple product-- presumably a slimmer and more angular silvery-whitish-clear enclosure. The idea is that on the low end you've got the iBook, with its 12.1-inch screen, 66 MHz bus, no PC card slot, and mirroring-only video port starting at $1299. Then the Son of Pismo unit would bump the screen up to 14.1 inches, add dual-display capability to the monitor port, jump to a 100 MHz bus, and gain a PC card slot and an infrared port; estimated starting price for this midrange model: $1999. Finally, at the high end there's the titanium PowerBook, with its G4 processor and super-wide 15.2-inch screen, all for $2599 and up.

We'll learn the truth when Steve takes the stage in July, of course, but the more we think about this whole "Son of Pismo" thing, the worse an idea it seems to be. We get a lot of mail here at the AtAT studios from people wishing that Apple would release everything from PDAs to tablets to monitorless iMacs to breakfast cereals (we hear the licensing negotiations over Apple Jacks are imminent)-- and what we've never heard since May 1st is a clamor for a laptop positioned between the iBook and the PowerBook. Back when the iBook was a seven-pound space clam we heard from plenty of people demanding an Apple subnotebook, but now that the new iBook fills that need quite nicely, we haven't heard a peep from anyone who really wishes they could buy last year's PowerBook in a new enclosure. Maybe the demand's out there and we just don't see it-- and, of course, even if the demand isn't out there, that hasn't stopped Apple in the past. (Cube, anyone?)

All we can say is this: if Apple is planning on splitting its notebook market up three ways, it had better have learned some darn good lessons from the Cube sales fiasco. A "middleBook" would somehow have to attract customers who otherwise wouldn't consider buying a Mac portable at all-- or at the very least, it would have to get customers who would have gotten an iBook to pony up an extra few hundred simoleans to trade up to the next level. It can't cannibalize any PowerBook G4 sales, which is a tough criterion to meet; Go2Mac's proposed product line-up would likely inspire a slew of potential PowerBook customers to save $600 by sacrificing the 15.2-inch screen and Altivec power, neither of which are exactly crucial features for most pros. Frankly, we don't see how Apple could pull it off. Then again, it's not our job to come up with a workable plan, and Apple's performed miracles before. We just hope that when we're sitting in the audience at the next Stevenote, we don't see something that makes us cringe as visions of earnings warnings dance in our heads.