Ah, here we go! Remember last week when we bemoaned the dearth of juicy pre-Expo rumors with nary a month to go before the big show? Well, now it looks like things are finally starting to kick into high gear. Of course, we had to import some foreign-made gossip from Taiwan in order to get the ball rolling, but hey, sometimes you just can't buy American, you know?

Behold the vessel of our rumorological salvation: DigiTimes cites "sources in Taiwan's IT industry" as it reports that Apple plans to ship a "next-generation 'New iMac'" no later than March and more likely in "January or February," making it a shoo-in for guest-star status during next month's Stevenote. DigiTimes claims that the new machine will have a "magnesium-alloy case and a high proportion of plastic parts for cost reduction." Gee, sounds sexy. Especially when you realize that DigiTimes probably isn't referring to any gee-whiz neato-keen magnesium enclosure, per se, but rather to the skeleton of the system living beneath the "high proportion of plastic parts." Then again, the publication notes that the current iMac "uses a stainless steel and zinc alloy," which sounds suspiciously like the articulated arm on which the display perches, so maybe that's what's at issue. It's really not clear.

Seriously, even though the article is in English, the language barrier can be fierce. The article also notes that "in September [Apple] suspended a plan to integrate a Tablet PC and DeskNote into a new line of products, dubbed the 'New New iMac,' due to cost considerations. The company has now decided to adopt less expensive materials to manufacture the new generation of the New iMac to attain a more competitive cost." Wow. If you could somehow fashion it into a hat, that text is practically opaque enough to shield you from spaceborne gamma radiation. Needless to say, the wording is at least mildly ambiguous, and so MacRumors apparently interprets it as saying that the tablet device is still on hold while the magnesium-alloy iMac is a separate imminent product, whereas The Register takes it to mean that the tablet thingy was on hold in September, but is now moving forward and is the "New New iMac," also referred to as the "next-generation 'New iMac'" and the "new generation of the New iMac."

It's clear as day, provided by "day" you mean "night during a blizzard to a man with toothpaste in both eyes who also happens to be suspended in mud." Personally, we lean more towards The Reg's reading, i.e. that what DigiTimes is trying to say is that Apple has a brand new iMac with a removable screen that can function as a tablet device, and that it was supposed to have shipped in September but didn't for cost reasons, and now Apple has reworked its design with a bunch of cheap material and so it's going to ship in January or February. Whether or not DigiTimes is right or not is a whole separate matter; we're too busy untangling inscrutable syntax to worry about accuracy at this point.

However, if you're the kind of spoilsport who actually cares about anything as mundane as reliability in these matters, we should note that MacRumors lists plenty of examples of DigiTimes having been gloriously wrong in the past. And incidentally, Robert X. Cringely's source for his recent speculation about Mac tablets arriving as early as January was also the "Taipei press," so as far as we can tell, literally all of this buzz about an Apple-branded tablet device has been imported from Taiwan. That doesn't mean it's wrong, of course; plenty of Apple stuff is made there, so you have to figure that at least some of these Taiwanese "sources" actually know what's rolling off the assembly lines, and we personally find the idea of an iMac with a wireless removable tablet-style display a whole lot more viable as an Apple product than a "Me Too" Mac version of the Tablet PCs that are selling so poorly you'd think they were dipped in something unpleasant.

Whatever comes to pass, we suppose we'll find out in a month. Ooooh, see? This is the kind of anticipation we wanted! Thrills! Chills! Incomprehensible hints of questionable veracity from an industrious island nation! Our cup runneth over...