Ah, what a weekend-- short-lived though it was, who can help but grin at a revival of the ancient "Apple Set-Top Box" rumor? We've been down this road before, of course; rumors of some sort of interactive TV device ran wild way back in the "Columbus" days, flourishing in a fertile base of rampant speculation as Apple intentionally leaked false information in order to keep the top secret iMac under wraps. Then there were those "Weird Mac Things" that surfaced on eBay a couple of years ago, proving that Apple had been working on a new interactive TV system-- one that the company had apparently nixed as something not compelling enough to ship. And, of course, Apple did release a set-top box lo these many years ago-- the PiPPiN-- and it tanked. Hard.

In other words, there's precedent a-plenty, and when you stir that together with Apple's latest "Digital Hub" vision and the release of the decidedly non-Mac consumer appliance iPod, well, it doesn't take much to get people yammering about Apple's new set-top box and how we'll never watch TV the same way again. Cue ZDNet UK, who, as faithful viewer Craig Heydenburg pointed out, ran a fun little COMDEX preview last Friday, which offhandedly mentioned that at the show Apple would be introducing the i2DVD-- a single set-top unit that "combines DVD, MP3, and even interactive television technologies." (Needless to say, Craig wasn't the only one to cram our inbox with that happy little link. Do they make Alka-Seltzer for email programs? Because right now Em@iler can't believe it ate that whole thing.)

Now, if you just breathlessly loaded that ZDNet story only to discover that Apple's name is nowhere in attendance, allow us to explain: ZDNet screwed up. Badly. Evidently the reporter got some specs on a new set-top system called the i2DVD, decided that anything with a name that close to iDVD simply must have come from Apple, and ran with it-- thus launching the Mac-obsessed into a frenzy of unnecessary frothing at the mouth. The article has since been corrected to list the i2DVDBox sans its original inaccurate attribution to Apple. In short: real product, wrong company, naughty ZDNet-- an investigative news source whose motto is evidently "Fact-checker, shmact-checker."

If you don't believe this all happened, you might want to take a tip from faithful viewer The M@d H@tter and pay a visit to Mac OS Rumors, who, at broadcast time, was still serving up a lengthy analysis questioning not whether the product was Apple's at all, but rather whether or not this miraculous piece of Apple technology will surface before its expected ship date of "February or March of next year." Sweet Murgatroyd. Since a simple Google search revealed ZDNet's error with its first returned hit, clearly credibility is going out of style these days, because a lot of people seem to be going to an awful lot of trouble to get rid of it as quickly as humanly possible right now. Lucky us-- we never had any to begin with. Does that mean we're cool now?