Aside from the usual random speculation about Steve Jobs worldchanging release in a few hours time, there have been a few interesting articles recently, namely
- AT&T may no longer be the exclusive iPhone carrier in the US
- Amazon changing their royalty structure to encourage vendors to price their books at US$9.99, either scared of the new device’s market, or colluding with Apple to provide content for it?
- Google releasing Google voice for the iPhone via a web page rather than as an App Apple would have to approve
- The question of which input method the device will use (will Apple extend the iPhones Voice Control crack the voice recognition problem?), and of course
- the invite to the launch event itself (colour e-ink anyone?)
- 20 things about the hyped iPhone/iTablet/iSlate
- Doonesbury are devoting a week of strips to the launch
- Will this have anything to do with Apple hiring the Yale head of business school to start the Apple University
- Or AMD’s refresh of its low cost processors
- Apple’s stock price currently at US$215.59, up from around US$83 a year ago. Soon to come crashing down after the hype singularity of the launch as analysts realise that even the second coming of the Jesus phone can’t live up to everyone’s expectations. (Hint – follow the old Apple employee’s maxim of ‘sell before the keynote’)
I also wonder what the cool feature will be… Mesh networking? Biofeedback? Merging with other nearby devices to form a larger device? Inbuilt projector?
It will also be interesting to see if Apple launches any updates to their 17 inch MacBook Pro as they would probably always have done if they were attending MacWorld this year. Also, I predict an iPhone software update, an iTunes update and a Mac OS X update.
Now, lets sit back and see how wrong we all are…