Say what you will about our spotty broadcast schedule of late, but we can tell you this: there are definite advantages to occasionally being completely out of the loop for days at a time. For one thing, there's the whole "sleeping more than 90 minutes a night" thing; for another, there's the "less time spent contemplating dark thoughts of grievous violence against oneself and others" factor-- which, come to think about it, might conceivably be linked to the sleep thing, but in any case, it makes for a refreshing change of routine. But best of all, every once in a while it's nice to experience an Apple product announcement without the pangs of disappointment that come with pre-release rumor overload.

For example, faithful viewer Simone Bianconcini just informed us that, according to a new Apple press release, the company has finally released a second-generation iPod mini family: the 4 GB model is now just $199, while a new 6 GB unit takes over the original $249 price point. True, both configurations now come in only "four vibrant colors" (gold has been retired, presumably because 98 percent of the population found the gold iPod too flashy and the remaining 2 percent found its subtle matte finish and total lack of inset gemstones nowhere near flashy enough), but in our considered opinion, the increased battery life of "up to 18 hours" (!) more than makes up for the slight reduction in bling. Heck, if you really need to, you can always save fifty smackers on a 4 GB model and go to town with a can of gold spray paint and a Be-Dazzler.

In other words, the new minis look great to us-- but they might look considerably less great to you, especially if you've been poking around at Think Secret lately and were fully expecting today's miniPods to boast color screens and a choice of six new enclosure colors instead of four old ones. Them's the risks of cruising for insider dirt. And hey, even if Think Secret had been 100 percent correct (as it often is when it posts last-minute details on unreleased products), isn't it still a little bit of a letdown when you aren't surprised by a single thing Apple says?

Not that we're suggesting you stop chowing down at Rosie's Rumor Bar & Grill, mind you; heck, if we hadn't been otherwise preoccupied with suppressing violent urges in a valiant attempt to postpone being mentioned on the national news in connection with phrases like "multi-state rampage" and "before turning the guns on themselves," we'd have been cramming ourselves full of everything on the menu and then coming back for seconds. No, we're just making an observation, which is that jumping off the all-rumor diet for a few days really made today's iPod mini revision a whole lot more satisfying. Unfettered by rumors of color screens and minis in plaid, we were able to see the new models as fixing what we've long considered to be the mini's three biggest flaws when compared to its competition: price, capacity, and battery life. This is a solid upgrade to an already solid product, and realistically, we can't see how Apple could possibly have done much better.

Of course, having read the rumors after the fact, now we're disappointed that we can't buy a purple argyle miniPod with a full-color screen, but we'll deal-- mostly through the liberal application of way-out conspiracy theories. Given the site's usual accuracy in these matters, is anyone else wondering if Think Secret got spoonfed all that color-screens-'n'-six-new-colors malarkey as deliberate disinformation so that Apple could identify which employees are leaking info? Without going through all that tedious subpoenaing of third-party records? Ahhhh... we feel better already.