canspice.org

With Apple inviting media to a special event on 12 October, the Internet (or at least, the small part of it filled with Apple fanboys) is ablaze with rumour and conjecture. The “One More Thing” on the invitation alludes to Steve Jobs’ tendency (or habit) to, in keynote addresses, say “and one more thing…” before unveiling a new iPod or PowerMac or the cure to cancer. One More Things in the past have included:

• 22″ Cinema Display (1999)
• PowerMac G4 Cube (2000)
• PowerBook G4 Titanium (2001)
• PowerBook G4 Aluminum 12″(2003)
• iPod Mini, iMac G5 (2004)
• iPod Shuffle (2005)

A fair bit of new products that have generally received the “holy shit that’s awesome” response. Excepting possibly the PowerMac G4 Cube.

What’s next week’s One More Thing going to be? There seem to be two competing camps, here. The first says that it’s going to be speed bumps to the PowerMac G5 line and the introduction of a PowerBook G5. The second says that it’s going to be a video iPod and some sort of tie-in with home entertainment.

So what does your intrepid blogger (that’s me) think? Video iPod. It would be silly of Apple to release a new series of computer, what with the switch to Intel CPUs coming soon. “Here’s this amazing new PowerBook, and by the way, it’ll be obsolete in six months.” Then again, that’s what normally happens with computers. Six months to obsolesence is a long time, really.

But there’s a bit of evidence pointing to a video iPod. The announcement is being held at the California Theatre in San Jose. The invitation has movie theatre-style curtains in it. In a previous keynote address, Jobs said that this year is the year of high-definition video, and announced greater support for the H.264 video codec. iTunes can do video. Apple apparently has a deal with Broadcom to use their BCM2702 multimedia chip in something. The BCM2702 is a broad-use chip designed for everything from PSP-like devices to digicams to phones. As of today, the URL http://www.apple.com/movies/ returns a page that says “You don’t have permission to access /movies/ on this server”, but going to any other URL that doesn’t exist (like, say, http://www.apple.com/canspice/) returns “Looking for something at apple.com?” — implying that there is actually a movies directory that will be made public at some point in the future. There are even video purchasing-related strings and icons in iTunes 5.

I’m going to predict this: video iPod, iTunes Music Store to sell music videos, possibly a video version of the AirPort Express. Within six months there’ll be an iTunes Multimedia Store that’ll sell full-length movies.

We’ll find out on October 12th.