Tuesday, January 11, 2005
The Leader Speaks
by Tom Bozzo
I haven't been driven into a frenzy by the Macworld SF keynote since the announcement of the PowerBook G4 in 2001. This year's reaction will depend on the quality of the rumor mill, grist for which includes (in roughly decreasing order of likelihood):
Woo-hoo! It's Steve Jobs' keynote speech day at Macworld San Francisco, a day when many of us in the Macintosh-using world get to learn how much money we have to convince our spouse the latest round of Apple stuff is worth. Apple's soaring stock price may put some extra pressure on the lavishly compensated Jobs to deliver something, or things, insanely great this time. Speculation has indeed been rampant, even here, with cease-and-desist orders flying to Mac rumor sites as fast as Apple legal can draft them.
I haven't been driven into a frenzy by the Macworld SF keynote since the announcement of the PowerBook G4 in 2001. This year's reaction will depend on the quality of the rumor mill, grist for which includes (in roughly decreasing order of likelihood):
- An announced ship date for Mac OS 10.4, "Tiger." Unlikely to induce frenzy — the 10.3.x releases have been running just fine on my aging PowerBook.
- A third iPod model based on flash-memory chips, priced lower than the iPod Mini. An Italian Mac site may or may not have captured an image of the device while photographing the Expo set-up. This might be big for Apple investors as, among other things, the market for lower-end digital players is large and a no-moving-parts iPod could mark a concerted effort to move the iPod into cars, whose thermal environments can be rough for hard drive-based players, in place of CD changers.
- Slightly faster PowerBooks. They're due, and the gestation of the possibly frenzy-inducing PowerBook G5 is probably not yet over. This would be non-news of the sort that could be pushed off to a quiet post-Expo announcement depending on how much other material Jobs might have.
- A very compact, low-price, "headless" (i.e., monitor not included) iMac. If this does appear, and is priced according to rumors, it may show up in the corner of the kitchen that serves as Blog Central. At this point, I have broken the rule of talking to Suzanne about stuff before blogging about it.
