Rui CarmoI’ve been having another of “those” weeks again (too much to do, too little time), but comic relief hasn’t been exactly thin on the ground, what with the MWSF hype reaching epical proportions ever since the sentence “There’s something in the air” surfaced a few days ago.
Heck, there’s even a hilarious game where you play Steve and have to run around picking up a black turtleneck, a 3G iPhone prototype and all sorts of stuff required for the event, all the while avoiding spies and journalists and confusing them with your reality distortion field.
And it didn’t take much to find a potpourri of suppositions about what may (or may not) come out of next week’s religious, sorry, marketing event.
I myself have dabbled (or rather doodled) on the topic, and it wouldn’t surprise me much if Apple were to have another go at making the Apple TV relevant, or (finally) have a go at place-shifting (regardless of their recent content alliances, the tech bits are pretty much all there already).
And yeah, sure, an HSPA iPhone would be great (it’s so far behind the curve right now that one of the industry jokes is that other manufacturers will eventually introduce HSUPA phones and Apple will still be in 3G denial mode…). But in keeping with the “in the air” theme, I’d much rather have a Bluetooth-enabled iPod Touch.
Neither of them are really likely, but I did find it odd that Apple is offering a live stream of the thing for European media. Maybe he does have some interesting sales figures (or international content deals) to showcase.
There was one thing that did tickle my fancy regarding that RoughlyDrafted piece, which was the possibility of Mac laptops sporting a wireless broadband module – which is, incidentally, something that you can get in a number of laptops these days in mini-PCI module format (and machines with those are already pretty common at some companies).
And it doesn’t take much to build that in, actually. You need a little re-arrangement of the PCB for an extra module (something that can probably be best achieved on the Pro range, since they have the most room), swapping out the antennae for something that can also cover the new frequency ranges, and that’s pretty much it.
And it’s even been done already on a Mac mini, so the only real issue would be shipping different wireless modules per territory (and Apple is cosy with Novatel, so that shouldn’t be at all hard).
Update: Glenn weighs in on the (un)likelyhood of Apple going WiMax, especially for those of you who still believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Except, of course, that you need to do a whole lot of certification and testing. For the whole thing, and not just once. Although there have been so far, no “FCC”:Wikipedia:FCC filings as far as I can tell from across the Atlantic, there’s a bunch of fresh regulation “Europe-side“European that makes it somewhat unlikely this pops out soon after MWSF, and we all know how much Steve likes to say “available today”.
Still, it’s going to be fun seeing what he does make available the day after, and watching the prediction silliness sprouting all over the place until then.