And thus does a promising minor subplot drop down dead on the spot with its spindly little legs twitching gently in the breeze. Remember all those rumors flying around a couple of months ago claiming that Apple was wedging a teensy satellite radio receiver into the next-generation iPod? At first people figured that rumors of imminent XM Radio portability had to have been connected with an Apple music media event slated for the same day, but the iPod just went photo while XM unveiled that portable MyFi doohickey that clashes so badly with Elton John's outfit. So then there were whispers that Apple had instead inked a covert deal with SIRIUS to bring that company's satellite offerings to the iPod in an effort to leapfrog those piddly lil' FM receivers found in "competing" MP3 players-- but, of course, Macworld Expo came and went and SIRIUS was nowhere to be seen. So what's the deal?

Well, apparently the deal is that there is no deal-- at least, not if you can believe the CEO of SIRIUS himself. According to CNN/Money, Mel Karmazin admits that he's "talked recently with Apple Computer about adding satellite radio to its popular iPod music player," but won't say much else... except that Steve Jobs's "current thinking" is that the folks at Apple "don't need to put a satellite radio in their box"-- which is obviously a reasonable assessment at this point. After all, iPod uptake has been terrifyingly exponential in the past year or so, despite the device's lack of a radio tuner, satellite or otherwise; at the end of 2004 there were 2.5 times as many iPod owners as satellite radio subscribers, XM and SIRIUS combined. As it is, Apple can barely build iPods fast enough to sell them, so adding a feature like a satellite tuner hardly seems urgent right now.

Which is a bummer for SIRIUS, no doubt, since the underdog company might have struck a death blow to XM had it been able to make the rumors come true. As for where these rumors came from in the first place, when Karmazin says he's talked to Steve "recently," we don't know exactly how recently, but it couldn't have been all that long ago; the guy only snagged the SIRIUS CEOship in mid-November. But if he's at all worthy of his job, he probably tried to wangle an iPod deal right away, since such an arrangement would likely have smacked XM's MyFi clear across the room to whimper pitifully in a dark corner, and we wouldn't be at all surprised if the SIRIUSpod rumors started when someone at either company just happened to notice that Karmazin and Jobs were talking. Of course, the flip side to that possibility is that Karmazin heard the rumors and then decided to give Steve a call to see if life might imitate art. The whole situation has sort of an intriguing "chicken or egg" dynamic to it.

Not that any of it means squat, of course, since what we do know for sure is that SIRIUS doesn't get to ride the iPod bullet train to victory through the smoldering ruins of the XM Empire-- at least, not yet. But if the iPod's competitors ever start to gain some serious ground (hey, it could happen), there's always a chance that Apple's "current thinking" will shift slightly and Jobs and Karmazin will repeat their recent conversation, only with a slightly different outcome. In the meantime, iPod users will have to content themselves with hearing exactly the commercial-free music they want to hear (instead of something close), and SIRIUS will have to hope that it can gain on XM with its recent signing of Howard Stern. As far as ultimate weapons are concerned, he's no iPod, but you make do with what you've got.