It's official: the latest round of November 5th rumors has finally reached a state of Rumoric Convergence. You know how, early on in an Apple rumor's life cycle, there are typically seven or eight variations on the same general theme? You get one guy saying that Steve Jobs will juggle chainsaws onstage during January's Expo keynote, a second insisting that Jobs will bite the head off a live pigeon instead, a third stating that he'll be swallowing three chainsaws and a pigeon while riding a unicycle and singing "MacArthur Park," etc. As time marches ever onward and the alleged event approaches, each rumormonger "adjusts" his dirt with new information that's appeared, and all those rumors start to blend together and overlap until finally everyone basically agrees that what's really going to happen is that Steve Jobs will be picking up a citrus zester and a casaba melon at the Safeway on his way home from work next Thursday. It's a process as natural as spring giving way to autumn. Or something.

So anyway, here's the latest on the convergence progress of the November 5th rumors: on the Mac OS Rumors front, after hedging for the past several days, the site has finally come around to admitting that there's "very compelling evidence" pointing to PowerBook and iBook revisions "early next week." MOSR also reiterates that, due to Apple's line-in-the-sand decision to wait for ultrathin slot-loading DVD-R drives instead of compromising and adding something as gauche as a (shudder) disc tray to the PowerBook, if those portables do indeed surface in Tuesday, none of them will include SuperDrives. Sorry, road warriors: no dice yet on burning DVDs on the go, at least not if you want to stick with a Mac.

And the convergence continues, because by an utterly amazing coincidence, that all meshes nicely with a new report by Think Secret, which wholeheartedly embraces the previously-dished magical November 5th date. According to Think Secret, we will indeed see new 'Books come Tuesday, and the PowerBooks will definitely be SuperDriveless. (Incidentally, Think Secret also tosses another little pinch of spice into the mix: reportedly iBook prices will drop "just a bit." Woo-hoo, that means more money to spend on Fruit Roll-Ups and Pez!)

So there you have it: everybody's pretty much on the same page now. The smart money's on modestly updated iBooks and PowerBooks come Tuesday, sans SuperDrives, but with faster processors, probably more RAM and bigger disks, maybe Bluetooth built-in, and perhaps even a nice little price break on the consumer models. No additional word on those whispers of a 19-inch Cinema Display, but heck, there's no reason to ruin all the surprises.

For what it's worth, we here at AtAT consider Think Secret to have a near-100% track record with pre-announcement product info like this, so we'll eat our hat if it turns out to be wrong. Then again, the hat in question is a novelty sombrero we ourselves fashioned entirely from Fruit Roll-Ups and Pez, so we're not exactly risking much, but still, it's something, right?

Mmmmmm... Pezzy!