TECH BLOG
Where's This Year's iPhone?

About to visit my first-ever Macworld, I'm reminded of the coverage I read from afar about last year's event. All eyes were on the iPhone -- will it or won't it make an appearance? Will Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) stock tank if it doesn't? Will it explode if it does? Will it even be called an "iPhone," because Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) has this thing ...

Photos and illustrations of what the iPhone would supposedly look like were all over the place. Viewing them back then made you think, "Huh, I guess that could be it." Now, of course, they all look ludicrous.

Tough Act to Follow

This year, though, there's no such buzz surrounding any single item. There's word of a so-called MacBook mini, but a computer company making new computers is not a revolution. A refreshed Apple TV is another prediction going around, but the first version of that product was so lame (it was wisely tucked into iPhone's shadow when it was unveiled last year) that a second version -- even if it's excellent -- comes off as something much short of a breakthrough.

However, even though Apple TV was something of a let-down, it was, like the iPhone, a wholly new and entirely different product for the company. Macworld '07 took Apple into two new worlds. Can we come to expect equally important breakthroughs from the company every year from now on, or will 2008's event play out as something a little more sedate?

I still have high hopes for the clincher, the "one more thing" announcement that comes at the end of every Macworld keynote. It's a very secretive company, though, so I cannot even pretend to have any idea what it is. Instead, what follows is a handful of rumors being thrown around in various venues about other keynote announcements -- the revelations that come right before that one last thing that's supposed to send us all into a state of tech Zen.

Blu-ray Drives

Considering recent events, it would seem that Blu-ray is the only logical way to go if you want to build a high-definition drive into a Mac. Until last week, though, the format situation was a lot more up in the air, and if Apple wanted to offer Blu-ray drives in new computers to be unveiled and instantly available at Macworld, it would have had to start working long before that. Unless they had some inside info, that would have been a risky proposition.

Then the new Mac Pros came out this week with no high-definition drives at all. If Apple had any Macs with Blu-ray drives ready to sell by Jan. 15, I think it would have built those drives into its top-of-the-line desktops as well, and it would have withheld the Mac Pro release for Macworld so as not to tip its hand.

New Apple TV

Adding a DVR to Apple TV would finally make it buyable, especially if everything it recorded could be ported to an iPod/iPhone. Broadcasters probably wouldn't especially like that, but TiVo (Nasdaq: TIVO) seems to be able to get away with it with its TiVo2Go software. Throw in HD-quality recording, and Apple TV 2 could be the best DVR in the field.

Or, Apple may just try to tide over Apple TV with a downloadable update that adds a few features. That may please the handful of current Apple TV owners out there, but it wouldn't quite give the product a second wind.

New iPhone Models

A lot of reporters who cover Apple news know that unless the story is accompanied by a large press kit or a quarterly earnings report, calling Apple for comment is basically just a matter of due diligence. If someone there picks up the phone at all, it's only to tell you the company has nothing to say. The strategy seems to work well -- plenty of people outside the company (ahem) are more than willing to lob rumors around and shake up a huge amount of interest and attention, all without Apple itself having to make any promises. It's honed corporate secrecy to an art form.

That's apparently not the case with its partner, AT&T (NYSE: T). Last Fall, CEO Randall Stephenson let slip that a 3G iPhone was on the way and would arrive this year. There's some expectation that Macworld will be the place for its unveiling, perhaps as part of a complete line of iPhones: a standard model with a few incremental upgrades from the existing one; an iPhone nano, perhaps without a Web browser; and a premium model with 3G, GPS and other things critics have noted are missing from the device.

Such a lineup would give sales a kick. An iPhone nano would be especially attractive to anyone who wants an iPhone but has no need for mobile Web. Having three options, including a less expensive one, could help it easily reach its goal of selling 10 million by 2009.

Apple would almost have to make them available immediately or risk causing current iPhone sales to grind to a halt in the meantime. But is the timing right for new iPhones? The company took a lot of flack for cutting the iPhone's price just two months after rolling it out. A new line isn't the same as a price cut, but the same "If you'd told me that, I would have waited" response may come up. Still, that's not a great reason for sitting on a hot product if it's otherwise ready to go.

Also, Apple CEO Steve Jobs commented earlier in 2007 that battery life for a 3G iPhone wasn't good enough yet. Granted, that was months ago, and battery technology evolves fast, but when a company won't let customers change their own phone's batteries, it'd better give them an insanely great power cell to begin with. Are batteries good enough yet?

iTunes Rentals

Funny how rumors about new Apple products and offerings always seem to have a lot more credibility when the product they're talking about involves a partnership with another company. Apple can, and apparently does, command a great degree of secrecy among its own employees, but when you start drawing other companies into the fold, all of a sudden you've got speculation about your next moves getting published in the likes of Business Week and Financial Times rather than hobbyist and enthusiast blogs.

I hope it's correct that several major studios will agree to allow their titles to be available on iTunes for rent. Online renting needs to get better, and iTunes could be the one to raise the bar.

Changing Forms

Thinbooks, UMPCs, sub-notebooks, whatever you want to call them -- for some people, smaller is always better in laptops. Smaller can also be faster and more energy efficient if the notebook uses NAND flash memory instead of a traditional hard drive. Apple is already the second-largest buyer of NAND flash memory, and svelte design is always something it pays particular attention to. A small-form MacBook or MacBook Pro may make its debut, along with a docking station that basically turns it into an iMac, as told by MacNN.

I'm not personally a huge fan of small-sized notebooks. If you can make it that small, I figure, why not make it twice as big and give it more power? I'm reasonably healthy; I can carry it. But I do admit, imagining what a thinned-out MacBook Pro might look like, it does seem pretty appealing. We'll see where I stand on the small-notebook issue after I finish schlepping a full-sized laptop case around Macworld all day.

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