Apple fans love speculating about imaginary new products almost as much as they love getting their hands on a brand-new MacBook Air.

But it's easy to get carried away and take these speculative flights of fancy as true, or even as somewhat credible rumors.

The latest of these rumors is the $100 Walmart iPhone, such a preposterous proposition that we thought we'd take a look at the rather obvious reasons why Apple won't be stripping either the price or the capacity of its highly successful cellphone.

And while we're at it, let's debunk the Apple netbook and the Apple tablet, two other rumors that refuse to die.

$99 iPhone

Myth: According to the entire internet, Apple will, just after Christmas, sell a 4GB, $100 iPhone through Walmart. The usual excuse is made: Apple needs to sell cheaper hardware in "these troubled times."

Fact: Apple will in fact sell iPhones through Walmart, but they will be the same ones you can get elsewhere, and at the same price. What every one of these analysts fails to understand is the Apple business model. The company just doesn't do cheap.

Look at it this way: Apple's PC market share continues to grow. The iPhone seems unstoppable. The new "expensive" unibody MacBooks are doing just fine. Why on earth would Apple undercut its own successful iPhone line with a cheap version? If it can sell as many $200 or even $300 iPhones as it likes, why sell a $100 one?

The 4GB part of this rumor irks, also. Name one other product line from Apple which has seen a memory decrease. You can't. The fact that Apple already discontinued the 4GB iPhone because the sales were slow compared to the 8GB model should tell us something. Yes, there might be a 4GB, $100 iPhone. It will be announced at the exact same time as a 5GB, HDD iPod. With a physical clickwheel.

Mac Tablet

Myth: Some day soon, Apple will release a touchscreen Mac tablet. It'll be sort of like a Windows-based Tablet PC, except not lame.

Fact: Let's face it — a Mac tablet is basically an oversized iPod Touch. And we love the persistence of this rumor, mostly because we would actually buy an oversized iPod Touch. But we have the feeling that after an hour or so of playing, we'd want to go outside — and the oversized iPod Touch wouldn't fit in our pocket. We further imagine that we'd soon hanker for a proper keyboard to get some work done. The thing is, Apple already makes a tablet PC, and it is the current iPod Touch.

The other problem would be price. How much would Apple charge for a tablet? It would have to be a lot more than the Touch, itself already an expensive little device at the high, 32GB end. What would you pay? $800? $1,000? That's a little too much for such a specialist computer.

Mac Netbook

Myth: Apple is just about to release a super-light, super-cheap netbook. Unlike the MacBook Air (thin, light, but wide and expensive) this will be small enough to fit into a purse and will cost less than $500, just like an Eee PC or an MSI Wind.

Fact: Steve Jobs dismissed the netbook market as "nascent." This certainly doesn't mean that Apple won't make one — Jobs has a history of denying entire product categories until Apple is ready to actually ship — but don't expect an Apple netbook anytime soon.

Why? Apple almost never rushes products to market. Look at any Apple success of the last few years and you'll see not a brand-new product but a simpler, often better version of what has been around for a while. The iPod was certainly not the first portable MP3 player, the iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, although in both cases you'd be forgiven for thinking so.

One day, I'm sure, we'll see a tiny MacBook with a proper keyboard and a trackpad you can actually use. But it will be awhile, and it will probably cost more than the competition. In the meantime, you can hack your own Mac netbook using an MSI Wind and a copy of OS X.