Stuff Apple Never Gets Around to Launching

After years of rumors and hype preceding the launch of both iPhone and iPad, Apple fans are suddenly without stuff to look forward to or muse about, and it shows - rumor sites are still abuzz about Lion, but that is nearly a year away, and neither the Air nor iLife did anything to satisfy the rumor mills.

So at the risk of having to wade through even more asinine stupidity in my RSS feeds, I decided to put forth a few rumors of my own, cast as product descriptions for things Apple never gets around to launching (I’m not really making an effort to imitate Apple’s amazingly polished Marketing copy, but…).

Here are five, off the top of my head:

The Best Way To Draw, Ever.

With advanced tools and easy-to-use smart shapes, Drawings lets you capture your ideas in graphical format and share them with friends and family.

• Running Start - Includes dozens of templates and hundreds of pre-defined shapes to cover all your needs
• Express yourself - Revolutionary freeform and effects tools for captivating results
• Visual Harmony - Dynamic guides, snapping and alignment aids make sure your drawings are perfect from the start.
• Finger Painting - Drawings fully supports the Magic Trackpad, making it easy to rotate and zoom shapes through intuitive gestures.
• Perfect Delivery - Transfer your work to Keynote with a single click for creating astounding presentations.

Drawings is part of the iWork‘11 suite and saves in the industry standard SVG and PDF formats. You can also exchange documents with Windows users via the Visio Interchange Format.

All Your Stuff, All The Time.

AirSync is built into Mac OS X Lion, and automatically syncs all your documents, photos, videos and music with your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch without the need for a USB cable. Set up your favorite playlists in iTunes‘11 or drop your documents in the AirSync folder, and everything will be automatically transferred once you connect to the same Wi-Fi network as your Mac.

MobileMe users can use AirSync to instantly share their files securely with friends and colleagues through easy-to-manage shared folders, using industry-standard encryption.

4G Internet, To Go.

The smallest mobile router ever, the AirPort Pocket will give you a Wi-Fi signal anywhere in the world. With a revolutionary eco-friendly design, the AirPort Pocket can provide connectivity to up to 5 Macs or iOS devices for up to ten hours on a single charge.

AirPort Pocket supports the LTE draft specifications for 4G networks and the following legacy standards:

• LTE/UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA (850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz, LTE 2100MHz only)
• GSM/EDGE (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz)
• 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz only)

Requires an industry standard microSIM and a data plan. Available at outrageously cheap prices in the US only.

The Mini, Cubed.

Introducing the most expansible small office server ever - the Xserve Cube offers three easily accessible 3.5-inch SATA 2 drive bays supporting up to to 6TB of internal RAID storage in a small, compact enclosure with the same footprint as the Mac mini but six times the storage capacity.

With Lion Server preinstalled, the Xserve Cube gives you unprecedented flexibility. The amazing features in Lion Server make it easy to share contacts and calendars, access your information anywhere, and more.

With XSAN Express, the Xserve Cube ensures your data is replicated transparently off-site to another Xserve anywhere in the world using industry standard protocols and security.

Power at your fingertips

The new Apple Magic Keyboard is the first keyboard to be designed as a one-piece interactive touch surface. Revolutionize your desktop and replace all the clutter with its sleek, low-profile aluminum enclosure and magical ultra-wide touchscreen display.

With a 1024x384 resolution, an unprecedented viewing angle and the ability to act as a secondary wireless display for your Mac, the Magic Keyboard is truly magical - you can use it both as a standard keyboard and as a trackpad, and the new Touch preference pane lets you customize visual indicators, layout and visual themes.