It's been a long-standing problem for Apple: no matter how short a leash Steve keeps on his own employees, he's got considerably less control over the blabbing habits of the third party companies on which Apple relies. Take, for instance, the leaked "Kihei" photos (allegedly swiped from the firm who worked on Apple's marketing pieces) which revealed the Autumn 1999 iMac days before Steve planned to spring the surprise. Consider also the way in which graphics chip provider ATI accidentally spilled the beans about new iMacs and Power Macs just before the 2000 Stevenote in New York. What does a guy need to do to get a secret kept around here?

Of course, loose lips among Apple's partners is one of the foundations upon which the entire Mac rumors cosmology is based, and so, for drama's sake, we're certainly not about to start complaining now. Thank heaven, then, for the Economic Daily News. According to a Bloomberg article forwarded to us by faithful viewer skuski, that newspaper reported that Quanta, a Taiwanese manufacturer of notebook computers, just got an order from Apple to crank out "more than a million iMacs a year starting in the first quarter of 2002." That interesting little factoid meshes rather well with the recent analyst murmurings of "component orders for producing 100,000 15-inch flat-panel iMacs per month, starting in January."

It's worth mentioning, however, that no source is given for the news of the Quanta order (not even those omnipresent "sources close to Apple"), and leaked Apple-related info from Taiwanese manufacturing firms hasn't always been 100% Grade-A accurate. That said, the Economic Daily News included other details that are starting to sound awfully familiar to anyone who's been following the latest iMac frenzy: reportedly the new iMac will boast a "15-inch liquid crystal display" and it'll be introduced next month in San Francisco by His Steveness himself.

It sure looks like this whole Quanta spiel snaps together pretty well with the buzz in the rumor mill, as well as with what some little birds have been singing around the AtAT compound for the past week or so: namely, that the long-awaited LCD iMacs are absitively posolutely going to surface at the shindig in January. Personally, we had been thinking that Apple would rather wait until March so the company could time the new iMac's release with the completed transition to Mac OS X, but at this point we're going to have to concede that January's looking pretty darn likely now. So if you've been saving those pennies, start saving 'em faster...