Apple rumour mill churning

DEEP IN THE CLOISTERED HALLS of Castle Cupertino, murmurings of product refreshes and new lines are escaping into the wild and breeding like ecstacy-fuelled bunnies.

And Apple's traditional secrecy over everything it ever does continues to fan the flames of conjecture and gossip.

But filtering through the thousands of pages of Wibblery written about what the Thin White Duke will do next sometimes unearths tiny nuggets of truthy goodness.

It's true that, every September for the last three years has seen some kind of change to the Ipod line, so chances are this year will follow the pattern. Touch is the watchword of the week so we wouldn't be too surprised to see more of the media player's range featuring fingerable interfaces. More likely, however, will be capacity bumps and price drops.

And while we're prodding at the screen of our digital crystal ball, may we suggest that, with the exception of the Macbook Air, the whole Apple Lapple range is starting to look a bit long in the tooth.

Apple Big Kahuna Peter Oppenheimer let slip a hint about "future product transitions" last month and some have extrapolated (in that freakish way that archaeologists pretend they can tell what a 2,000 year old dead dude had for breakfast on the day he died from the way he tied his shoelaces) that the next batch of Ibooks will have touch screen technology built in.

Not likely. Mainly because if any of the loose-lipped Asian display fabs had started churning out touchy-feely screens in the kind of quantities demanded by a new Apple launch, we'd have heard about it by now.

And as for the rumour that Apple will be jumping on the Netbook bandwagon with the rest of the sheep and producing a low-cost low-powered crappy lappy... it ain't gonna happen.

If it does I'll eat my Iphone. µ