You know, there's really only one thing keeping us from buying an iPod mini: it's just too small. Not in terms of dimension, of course; physically, it may be just a little slip of a thing that Midwestern moms would be totally justified in calling an "eentsy-beents," but it's not so small that we'd worry about, say, accidentally inhaling it or absorbing it through our skin or something. No, when we say "too small," we're referring to its storage size, which, at 4 GB, is really only sufficient if you have a music library consisting of fewer than 1000 songs, or if you have the uncanny ability to ascertain with near-100 percent accuracy everything that you might want to listen to before the next time you dock your iPod. Otherwise you're going to wind up getting a craving to hear that extended dance remix of "We Built This City" by Starship only to discover that you erased it from your 'Pod the week before to make room for Michael Bolton's "Can I Touch You... There?"

Well, maybe not with those particular songs. Otherwise you've got a far bigger problem than not having enough space on your iPod. Trust us.

Good news, though: questions of musical taste aside, the grapevine is rife with rumors that Apple's planning to issue a revision to the iPod mini sometime sooner rather than later, and the one thing everyone seems to agree on is that it'll boast a bigger hard disk. AppleInsider reports that the new version will surface "early next year," packing a 5 GB hard drive to bring its capacity in line with the Rio Carbon and the Creative Zen Micro, the self-proclaimed "iPod mini killers" (that probably have about 6 percent of the market combined). AI also mentions the possibility of "potential color alterations and more 'metallic' finishes"; if one of them turns out to be shiny purple, we may finally have to bite.

If you're disappointed that a 5 GB mini would simply be playing catch-up with the competition, for what it's worth, Mac OS Rumors has some slightly differing info on the minibump: reportedly the new model will appear "just after the New Year" (which can only mean Macworld Expo, natch) and will have "6 or 8 GB" of space in its trunk, not 5. If true, that'd put Apple back out in front among players in the mini form factor, at least storage-wise. (If you really think you can scrape by with 4 GB, MOSR thinks the current models may drop to $199 when the new revs are announced.)

Whether the mini moves to 5, 6, or 8 GB, at least we could finally buy one without taking a storage step backward; we're still rockin' the original first-on-the-market iPod 'round these parts, so we're at least used to the constraints of a 5 GB playlist, if not overly thrilled by them. And while it seemed tiny in 2001, the first-gen iPod seems to have swollen over the last three years to be roughly the size and weight of your average house brick. Sure, that's just relativity talking, but relativity talks kinda loud. So if Apple does in fact up the mini's storage next month-- and throws some spiffy new colors in, to boot-- we may have to start digging between the couch cushions for an extra quarter or two. Or 996.