Well, if you're looking for Stevenote Eve rumormongering and last-minute speculation, sorry, but you're out of luck; we're all speculated out. Frankly, at this point we don't particularly care one way or the other whether miniPods surface tomorrow, whether they're Flash RAM- or disk-based, whether they come in colors (with or without stripes), whether they hit that magical $99 price point, or whether Apple claims they're produced from processed soy and lentils until Charlton Heston runs out on stage yelling that "they're people! MiniPods are PEEEOOPPLLLLLEEEE!" At this point we're sufficiently pooped from all the pre-Expo will-they-won't-they that we'll take whatever Apple gives us and be happy to get it. Kinda makes you wonder if that was the company's plan all along, doesn't it? Leak rumors of a miniPod a month before the show and watch the rumor-crazed fans work themselves into a foaming frenzy so that they're all complacent and quiet by the time the show rolls around.

Anyway, we know you're hurting for a dose of some sort of speculation the night before a keynote, so we'll back-burner the iTunes-on-Linux drama (we'll touch on that tomorrow, maybe) and instead send you over to Robert X. Cringely, who's making all sorts of fun predictions for the rest of 2004. That's right: the rest of the year, as in, days past tomorrow. Won't that be fun for a change? Items of particular interest to Macfolk such as yourselves include items 7 (Microsoft will buy Burst to end that company's patent infringement suit, which might spell trouble for QuickTime streaming), 12 (Wal-Mart's music download service "will undoubtedly take the leadership away from Apple" and it's "guaranteed... that Apple will introduce a cheaper iPod using Flash memory instead of a hard drive"-- whoops, guess we included a Stevenote thing after all), and 13 ("no Apple G6 in 2004, and the company won't sell nearly as many G5s as it hopes").

As far as we're concerned, we don't know nearly enough about the Burst thing to comment, but we have a tough time picturing Wal-Mart seriously overtaking the iTunes Music Store before the year's out. We also really don't see Apple releasing a Flash-based iPod that's actually cheaper than the current lineup (the whole point of the iPod is being able to take a serious wedge of music with you, and a cheap Flash-based iPod would be 1 GB at the most), and we're half-and-half on the G6 thing. While we wouldn't be surprised if Power Macs got new chips that technically could qualify as G6s, we figure Apple might not want to reprint all its stationery quite so soon. And we think G5 sales will be just spiffy, especially with new clustering initiatives that will follow in the footsteps of the third-fastest supercomputer in the world down at Virginia Tech.

But the main reason we bring up the article in the first place is because the last time we checked in with ol' Cringely not even a month and a half ago, he was predicting tablet Macs from Apple "as early as January." We can't help noticing that no such prediction shows up in this forecast for 2004. So did he change his mind, or does he consider an imminent tablet Mac such an absolute certainty that it's not even worth mentioning anymore? Just a little something to chew on while you're killing time until Steve struts his stuff...