You know the syndrome well: like a chemical burn, a bad rash, or that drunken college roommate who showed up in the middle of the night three weeks ago to crash on your couch "for a day or two," some rumors just refuse to go away. Some of them-- say, the Disney buyout, the Apple PDA, and a Mac OS X release for Intel-- stick around in the absence of any real evidence because they offer possibilities too intriguing to let slip off into the realm of pure fiction, but others hang in there because sooner or later they're going to turn out to be 100% true. So guess which one's quickly digging out a nice little trench for itself in the latter category? Yup, the rumorological Flavor o' the Month: lower-cost iPods that sacrifice the roomy goodness of bite-size hard drives for the relatively cramped solid-state cheaposity of flash memory.

The possibility's been a natural topic of speculation ever since the first iPod made eyeballs bulge with its $399 price tag three years ago, as foolish mortals the world over asked, "who really needs a thousand songs in his or her pocket?" Lots of people loved the iPod's style, its interface, and its seamless iTunes integration, but just couldn't swallow the sticker price and claimed they'd be perfectly happy spending maybe $149 to be able to tote five or six albums at once. Personally, having owned a 64 MB player and lived through the endless impossible hassle of trying to pick fifteen songs to sustain us through an entire day, we thought those guys were nuts, but hey, to each his own. Still, we thought Apple's original answer to the flash-based player-- namely, the $249 4 GB iPod mini-- made a whole lot more sense.

But a few weeks back, a Wall Street analyst started flapping his gums about well-placed sources in Asia who insisted that Apple had just signed a contract with the world's biggest manufacturer of controller chips used in flash-based players, and ever since then the talk of a flashPod has gone into overdrive-- despite Steve Jobs's continuing derision of that entire class of device at practically every public appearance he's made since 2001. Soon other analysts joined in, predicting the advent of a $199-or-less flashPod sometime early in 2005. And now, as faithful viewer Frozen Tundra points out, AppleInsider is "confirming" that it's all true.

According to AI's "extremely reliable sources," production of the flashPod will start next month, with Apple intending to stockpile "approximately 2 million" units before it puts the product on store shelves in order to avoid the supply problems that frustrated would-be customers for months after the iPod mini was introduced. Worldwide shipments are reportedly slated for "late January or early February" following a traditional Stevenote intro at January's Macworld Expo.

So with a storage capacity "in the range of 256 MB to 1 GB," will people buy these things? Well, yeah, of course they will; they already buy other flash-based players, so the public at large will most likely claw each other to bloody tatters in the mad dash to buy the iPod version. That said, we'll stick to the hard drive models, thanks; to anyone used to more space, even with up to 1 GB of storage, the flashPod will feel like a straitjacket accidentally washed in hot water and tumble-dried on high. Case in point: we just got a 1 GB Secure Digital card for one of our Treos, and wowed as we are by the ability to cram a whole gigabyte of data onto something roughly the size, weight, and thickness of eight or ten postage stamps stuck together, the act of having to choose just twenty or so albums practically sent us into convulsions of claustrophobic terror.

Of course, that's why we have "real" iPods, and so will anyone else with a deep psychological need for sprawl; everyone else will snap up flashPods like those little pizza rolls at a Superbowl party. So all that remains, we suppose, is endless speculation about how Steve Jobs is going to weasel out of his previous anti-flash comments when he does a 180 in eight or nine weeks' time and starts gushing about the latest addition to the iPod family. Our money's on the "flash players do suck-- so we made one that doesn't" approach. Who'll give us odds?