What will they think of next? No, not Apple, the Mac rumor sites. Deprived of the Mac Tablet they assured us was coming, Cupertino-centered gossips will quickly have to come up with a cool new product to keep their readers coming back for yet another serving of wild speculation.

Not that we don’t like the rumor sites, in fact we love them with a deep and abiding passion. Sometimes they get it right, and sometimes the stuff they conjure up is so cool that Apple should be making whatever the gossipers are predicting is coming soon. Like that Mac tablet that everyone was buzzing about this summer, the one that became so real in the minds of many that it even was given a now-widely recognized name -- the MacBook touch.

Contrary to a belief that some in the mainstream media still frantically cling to, it’s not just bloggers who run amuck with wild enthusiasm and rumors. Back on July 29, 2008, BusinessWeek confidently all but promised its readers that they could “Expect a multitouch display similar to that found on the iPhone and the iPod touch. Apple has a solid set of patents on the new technology and has boned up on multitouch tech through the iPod line … I'm thinking a small MacBook with a multitouch screen that measures about 9 or 10 in.”

A post in PCWorld’s blog wisely opted to suggest, rather than foretell: “What if Apple were to release an ultraportable convertible notebook that combined the best of the tablet-and-touch worlds, and had a keyboard, too? Conceptually, that would take the rumors of both a reborn Newton and a compact notebook full-circle--all while delivering a device that would fill a void in Apple's current offerings.”

MacDailyNews heard about the MacBook touch from a source that had proved reliable before, having tipped them off about wireless direct to iPhone sales a week before Apple announced it. So when the same source said that Apple would be releasing a MacBook with “iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. This is why they bought P.A. Semi. Possibly with Immersion's haptic tech. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS. Pretty expensive to produce initially, but sold at "low" price that will reduce margins. Apple wants to move these babies. And move they will. This is some sick shit. App Store-compatible, able to run Mac apps, too. By October at the latest.” Yowza! MacDailyNews published the story, but sternly warned that it was an unconfirmed rumor. Can’t fault them for that, they showed more restraint than the mainstream media.

Apple Matters also suggested the MacBook touch was coming soon, cited the “image on Apple’s homepage that cryptically explained that 2007 was just the beginning,” and cheerfully welcomed us to the future.

Gizmodo rather grudgingly considered the rumor, matched it up with a couple of other rumors including Apple’s own promise to (as per a July 21 report by AppleInsider on Apple's chief financial officer, Peter Oppenheimer's promise of an soon-to-come “key product transition that has ‘technologies and features that others can't match.”) and surmised that the MacBook touch was sort of possible, given that Apple insisted something fabulous was in the works.

Apple’s gift for marketing -- or wild overpromising, depending on how you look at it -- certainly feeds these rumors. As Newsweek noted this morning, yesterday’s announcement hardly merited an invitation-only media event complete with live appearances by the Mothership’s fearless leaders, a press release really would have sufficed.

And there seems to have been a grain of truthiness in the rumor too, Jobs acknowledged on Tuesday that Apple had experimented with touch screens on laptops, “but they don’t make a lot of sense to us.” So perhaps the rumors were valid -- Apple was working on a MacBook touch sort of device -- at the time they started floating around.

In fact, Jobs probably killed the touch screen concept because he didn’t like the idea of people pressing their greasy, sweaty, frito-dust-filthy fingers all over his pretty MacBook display. Smudgy screens are totally un-zen, ugly, plebian, and very un-Apple. And since the marketing research department determined that no one, even the most devoted Mac user, would operate their MacBook touch solely with an Apple-approved, svelte and stylish stylus, the MacBook touch was cancelled. (Nice rumor, huh? Feel free to run with it.)

So no MacBook touch. What shall we all talk about now? How about that iPhone nano that’s due to be released any day now? We even have pictures of it! It’s perfect for your grandma, Apple patented the technology for it, analysts are talking about it and writing reports about it, and Apple has declined to comment about it -- so it’s gotta be true, right?