Gee whillikers, Wally, it sure has been a crummy week for fringe Mac rumors, hasn't it? For one thing, folks still holding out hope for a new Apple-branded handheld to replace the long-nixed Newton line witnessed yet another nail in that rumor's coffin on Monday (and you oughta see this coffin now-- think "Pinhead" from the Hellraiser flicks). MacUser UK recently slapped together an article in which Albert Chu, the veep of business development at Palm's operating system division, opined that Apple "will not be entering the handheld market"-- in large part because he feels that "Apple probably can't afford entry into the market 'cause it's going to cost so much to get in."

Which means apparently it costs more than $4 billion in cash to create and market a new PDA. Who knew? Geez, give us half that much moolah and we'll get an AtAT handheld on store shelves by Easter, guaranteed. (We guarantee that it'll ship; we don't guarantee that it won't be a deck of playing cards with an AtAT sticker stapled to the front.)

For what it's worth, Chu is an Apple veteran with fourteen years in the Cupertino trenches, and during his tour of duty he did work on the Newton, so his opinion may carry a little more weight than that of, say, Eli, that guy with the really hairy arms who delivers our heating oil. And while one might think that repeated assertions by the likes of Phil Schiller and The Big Steve Himself that Apple is no way no how looking to get into the PDA market would have sufficed to quash any and all "Apple handheld" rumors, as we all know, nothing those two say means squat until some guy at Palm backs them up.

Meanwhile, those who are still expecting x86-based Macs any day now despite that persistent rumor's most recent disappointment-- namely, AMD's COMDEX keynote delivering absolutely zippo on the Apple front-- now need to come to grips with the fact that, as faithful viewer Paul R. Ferro points out, even Mac OS Rumors (not exactly one to balk at proposing the far-out stuff, rumorologically speaking) is expecting PowerPC-based Macs for "no less than four years to come." Incidentally, MOSR also asserts that "we won't have to wait long for Apple's answer to the recent release of the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4"-- but also mentions that the next G4s will top out at 1.4 GHz and PowerPC 970-based Macs may not surface until 2004, which means we may be witnessing a truly momentous abuse of the subjective nature of the word "long." (Then again, MOSR never said that Apple's answer would be a good one.)

Anyway, that's two long-standing Apple rumors that took a bit of a beating over the past few days. So what's next, a joint Sun-Disney press release promising that neither company will ever ever ever buy Apple and signed in blood?