Oh, but there's just so much to be thankful for! Take, for example, Mac rumors with the persistence and dogged tenacity of a brain-starved zombie hobbling futilely after an amused and oh-so-wheeled Stephen Hawking as he motors away with a twinkle in his eye. You know the ones: "Disney buying Apple" is a perennial favorite. So is "Newton II/Return of Newton/Apple PDA." "Mac OS X boxed for Intel hardware" has risen from the dead so many times it's got George Romero's home phone number on speed dial.

And then there's a relative newcomer to the field, but still a rumor with a sticktuitiveness that has already assumed legendary proportions: the Apple Tablet. To a certain degree this is an offshoot of the "Newton II" rumor; for years mysterious cloaked figures have whispered under cover of darkness about an imminent Apple-branded tablet device that would use a stylus for user input and would do... well, something, although that "something" changes every so often. At one point it was a wireless remote desktop for a full-fledged Mac. At another time it may have been an education-targeted unit like the old eMate. For a while some people were certain it would hover in mid-air and attack one's enemies on command with miniature death rays and exciting pointy bits.

We hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Apple Tablet rumor for a good long while now (save a "whatever happened to?..." Q&A over at Mac OS Rumors last week), but faithful viewer bo alerted us to the fact that, of all people, Robert X. Cringely has unearthed the beast once more over at PBS. Cringeley's take on the matter is that the only reason Apple hasn't shipped a tablet yet is because so far there's been no killer app to make it sell-- but he expects that to change "soon."

The killer app of which he speaks is wireless streaming of full-on HDTV video, and apparently the IEEE has been trying to settle on a standard for such a thing for a while, now. You know, of course, that 802.11b is the 11-Mbps wireless networking standard upon which Apple based its original AirPort, and 802.11g is the newer 54-Mbps standard at the heart of AirPort Extreme. Well, the IEEE is reportedly getting close to ratifying a standard called 802.15.3 (the creativity and descriptive power in the naming never ceases to astound us; why call it FireWire when you can opt for 1394?), which will be an "Ultra-Wide Band" wireless networking technology with a range of about thirty feet or so and enough bandwidth to pump "Everybody Loves Raymond" through the air without requiring the ownership of an inconveniently large local CBS affiliate.

According to Cringeley, "Quanta, the Taiwanese company that makes many Apple notebooks, has been apparently switching its production to the new tablets, or at least that has been reported in the Taipei press since early this year." He says that Apple may have a tablet on the market "as early as January," and envisions an 802.15.3-enabled device that will allow you to "watch TV in your bathroom, access your audio and video collection from anywhere in the house" (as long as your house is less than sixty feet across, we suppose), and "control your big screen TV and route video to it from your desktop or the Internet." Furthermore, you'll also be able to "take a dozen movies and your entire music collection with you on a trip," "strap the gizmo to the back of your car headrest and entertain the kids," and tons more. In short, Apple's tablet will be the ultimate realization of the Digital Hub concept.

And there it is: the Apple Tablet rumor reborn. Believe it or don't; January's not that far away, and we'll know if Cringeley's smoking crack-ley soon enough. In the meantime, please excuse us-- we have a call to make...

"...Hi, Mr. Romero? We've got a movie idea we'd like to pitch to you..."