Ladies and gentlemen, the word of the day is "staggering." You probably noticed that during Apple's earnings conference call, ExecuVeep of Worldwide Sales and Operations Tim Cook used that word to describe customer demand for the miniPod-- twice. And with good reason, we figure, since availability of the shiny little gizmos is still practically nil and we've yet to meet a soul who wouldn't trade in his own grandmother if he thought it'd get him a miniPod before everyone's tooling around in flying cars. In a way, it's the right problem for Apple to have (it's better than too much supply and no demand-- or rabies, for that matter), but the fact remains that lots of people would love to give Apple loads of cash, but Apple can't produce the goods to make it happen. That there is what we in the old country used to call "missed opportunity."

Worse yet, Apple apparently doesn't expect to be able to come close to meeting miniPod demand for the foreseeable future, so given that fact, what can the company do to start turning some of that pent-up demand into filthy lucre? Answer: channel some of that miniPod lust into a product that Apple can ship. In other words, Apple needs to make the vanilla iPod more appealing-- and less vanilla. Luckily, at least one report claims that the company is doing just that; faithful viewer William Vogel alerted us to the rumor, as reported by Think Secret, that "Apple will announce new iPod models in August" that will be "smaller, sleeker, and will come in a variety of colors." Gee, now what does that description remind you of?

Yes, Apple is allegedly taking the miniPod to maxi proportions for the fourth-gen iPod; while its feature set will still outpace that of the less expensive miniPod, it'll be "more compact" than the current third-gen model, "sleeker," and "will come in a variety of new colors, expected to include purple, orange, and yellow." If that's true, then these maximiniPods will indeed stand a decent chance of drawing some of the attention-- and dollars-- away from frustrated miniPod coveters. After all, why wait another six months for a miniPod when its similarly-styled but bigger brother will be available in August? It'll cost more than a mini, granted, but an extra fifty clams or so will get you probably at least four times as much storage capacity, and you still get all of the hip aluminum styling of the miniPod, only without quite as long a blast from the Debigulator.

Now, we know what you're thinking-- making the regular iPod more like the miniPod might simply create the exact same problem again: demand will skyrocket and Apple won't be able to slap together enough iPods to satisfy it. But while that certainly could happen, we suppose, let's not forget that the bottleneck in miniPod production is the eensy-teensy hard drive that goes inside. No such drought occurs for the larger drives that go into the iPod, so Apple might just get away with this one. We'll find out soon, we suppose; August is closer than you think.