MACWORLD is coming

Let’s check in with a few of the rumours on the Net to see what the world is expecting Jobs to unveil, starting with what we know will be mentioned.

iTV

Jobs did something very uncharacteristic during his keynote address at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in August – he gave the world a sneak-peek at a product Apple was not ready to release.

The iTV is an interface box to connect your Macintosh to an HDTV. This will make it easier for Apple to sell videos at its iTunes Music Store and allow streaming the shows directly to your TV.

There are some rumours about iTV’s feature set. Some who saw the boxes in August said there seems to be a place for an internal hard drive.

Could the iTV be the digital video recorder some Apple customers have been dreaming about?

While we are on the subject of TV, the reoccurring rumours of Apple buying TiVo have showed up again – along with rumours of Apple licensing the TiVo operating system for the iTV boxes.

Leopard

Apple’s next version of the Mac OS X operating system – 10.5 (code name Leopard) – was introduced at the conference. Apple has said it will release Leopard in spring 2007. Mac users would love to see Leopard released at Macworld, but judging from the frequency of pre-release developer seeds, the operating system is not ready yet.

But we can certainly expect another extensive Leopard demo at Macworld, and perhaps there will be some new features mentioned.

During the Leopard preview, Jobs hinted that Apple was not going to talk about some of Leopard’s more unique features to keep them from showing up in Microsoft Vista.

Now that Vista has been released, we might expect to see more of the fun stuff Apple has planned for Leopard.

iPhone

The rumour season got started a month or so ago with stories about patents that were granted to Apple for a different type of portable device. Those rumours quickly turned to calling the device the iPhone. Linksys has since released a line of VoIP phones under the name iPhone, so we know what the name of the device won’t be.

Rumors say the phone will not be sold by a particular carrier, but rather at Apple stores and will combine the phone features with Apple’s popular iPod nano.

Macbooks

Apple has a pretty solid base of laptops with the Macbook and Macbook Pro lines, but there are consumers who want a smaller, lighter laptop – mainly for travel.

A late rumor is that Apple will unveil a 12-inch widescreen laptop (perhaps called Macbook Thin) that’s too light and small to even have an optical drive or traditional hard drive. Perhaps it might be the first Mac to sport only flash memory.

iPods

It’s long been rumored that today’s video iPod was introduced to prove the concept that people wanted to take video with them and watch it away from home.

Now that Apple’s iTunes Music Store has found success with movie and TV downloads, there is speculation that Apple has a so-called true video iPod ready to go.

The device could have the screen covering the entire front of the device, and controls would appear on screen when touched with a finger.

Rumor season before Macworld is like the geek version of March Madness. We look forward to it all year, spend hours talking and arguing about what the outcome will be, and we all tune in to see how much actually happens.