There has been a lot of speculation going around sparked by a comment made by a representative at Alpha Top, Apple's Taiwanese iBook fabrication contractor. According to the comment, Apple plans on releasing a 'larger-screened iBook' and will offer iBooks in different colors in July.

After a carefully worded denial by Apple (in itself a rarity), some Mac rumor sites have spun the comments and the wording of Apple's denial into the possibility of a third powerbook, priced around $2000, falling between the iBook and the G4 Powerbook.

This idea is highly suspect.

First, the speculation comes only hours after the Alpha Top and Apple comments, and seems to based on nothing more than spinning them into a reasonable rationalization. Second, and more importantly, such a product just doesn't fit from a marketing perspective. There is a vanishingly small number of people who would buy such a machine that wouldn't otherwise buy an iBook or TiPB.

Adding a product to the line costs a great deal of money, and in the 'new Apple' this is only undertaken when it will improve sales, not merely redirect them. This was the lesson learned by the Cube: People want expandability/functionality or they want value. A product wedged between the two didn't sell because people either weren't willing to sacrifice the expantability or higher clock speeds of the G4 PowerMac, or they weren't willing to pay so much more than an iMac, for a little more speed. The Cube is Apple's biggest failure in the past two years, and Apple isn't about to make the same mistake in the portable arena.

So why did Alpha Top say anything? One possibility is that, like any manufacturing contractor that OEMs to other companies, it uses PR not to build anticipation for new hardware, but to prove to the investment community that the company is prospering, and is worthy of its stock valuation. If Alpha Top is ramping up production for Apple, they need to be able to tell the world about it, so the world knows how well Alpha Top is doing as a company. It may have been misguided to elaborate on exactly what they're building, and knowing Apple's wrath if they were to reveal an upcoming product, they may have blurred the actual product to protect themselves, while still releasing the fact that they're doing more work for Apple on a new product.

There's little doubt that someone at Alpha Top messed up somewhere, but we'll just have to wait and see exactly how.