Sweet mother of blessed never-being-satisfiedness, just what does it take to make you people happy? Yesterday we busted out the Tarot cards and risked both eternal damnation and permanent carpet stains by consorting with the netherworld for hints about upcoming Apple hardware developments; making that major personal sacrifice allowed us to bring you spirit whispers of what might spell the imminent end of the single-button mouse for the Macintosh platform. But what do we find in our inbox instead of effusive thanks and promises to name your first-born children after us? Complaints from faithful viewers like FrozenTundra, who claims "disappointment" that our hardware scrying only turned up a glimpse of the future of input devices, and demands for "real" hardware news for a change.

Hey, c'mon, folks, bear in mind that the Spirits Beyond generally only maintain about a 60-day window into the future (they have to pay for Premium Service to see any further) and Apple has pretty much publicly stated that no new Macs are on the horizon in that time frame. Mix in the fact that if you're looking for the alleged inside scoop on future Apple projects, AtAT's really not the place to get it-- go harangue Mac OS Rumors or AppleInsider (or what's left of it, anyway); they're into the illicit trade secrets, whereas we're all about the ensuing drama. On top of all that, we don't exactly hear anyone rushing to offer to rent us a rug shampooer to get all this ectoplasmic residue out of the shag in the living room. Yuck.

But never let it be said that we don't go that extra mile for our oh-so-demanding viewers; haunted by the thought of your collective bitter disappointment, we tossed down a circle of salt, hauled out the graveyard dirt, and summoned up a minor poltergeist of our acquaintance that's been stealing single socks from the dryers in coin-op laundromats in and around Cupertino for the past few years. When forced to manifest himself on this plane, he's a nice enough free-floating apparition, as far as the overly-slimy ones go; his name's Shemp. (No, not that Shemp.) Anyway, as he permanently wrecked some floor-length drapes and gave the Scotchgard on our couch a serious workout, we asked him if he'd heard any poop from the other spirits on what might emerge later this summer, Mac-wise.

Sadly, Shemp was sorely lacking in the dirt department as far as details go, but he thought he may have heard something from the ghost of one of the decomposing bodies stacked in Uncle Steve's office coat closet about yet another PowerBook revision slated for an appearance at New York's Macworld Expo or thereabouts; apparently we're looking at one more incremental boost of the same basic titanium design, with bigger disks and faster G4s (maybe 800 MHz, maybe not) and-- here's the big news, if it's true-- a slot-loading SuperDrive. Ooh la la.

So was it worth psychically dragging Shemp's corporeal essence three thousand miles across our physical plane (not to mention forging a blood debt to the hungry wraiths that walk behind the walls and ruining just about every upholstered surface in our living room) just to hear vague second-hand spirit mutterings about a SuperDrive-packin' PowerBook on deck for this summer? Well, we sure hope so, because there's no way we're doing that again, even if we do survive the night without our souls being gnawed to pieces by the Harvester Shades. Or, at least, if we do, we're putting tarps down first.