Apple Event Predictions: New iPods, Beatles

August 31st, 2007

Yet another Apple event next week Wednesday, September 5th. The invite leaves no doubt this is an iPod / music related announcement.

Over the past month rumors have floated around the Internet regarding “fat” iPod Nanos, full screen iPods, iPods that run OS X, and the Beatles in the iTunes music store, and along with it a yellow iPod to match (undoubtedly a “Yellow Submarine” reference). After cutting through all the muck here are my predictions for next week’s event:

• A new iPod Nano. Speculation has been that the photos are fake and Apple wouldn’t release something that looks so… Nintendo-esque. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the Nano photographs are inaccurate. There will be a new Nano but it won’t look like the “fat” Nano.
• The iPod video will be full screen and touch enabled, plus larger capacity. Some folks are musing about WiFi — I think this won’t happen at this juncture.
• The big selling point of both of these iPods will be a new GUI served up by OS X. Most noticeable will be Cover Flow but there will undoubtedly be some other software enhancements. This will set Apple up with one code base for most of its devices and a future of more elaborate capabilities.
• Beatles will be on iTunes (hat tip to Paris Lemon for this). Evidence: it’s been in the works for ages and at this point, Ringo, Paul, and John all have their music in the iTunes Music Store. If George is added in the next few days pre-event, consider the Beatles a lock. And perhaps this will coincide with some Beatles video content for the store as well — movies? Concert footage?

In my fantasy world, the top line iPod video would be WiFi enabled, and we’ll also get an announcement regarding AppleTV — as in a beefed up version that is basically a low end Mac Mini. We may finally get HD downloads in the Apple Store — this announcement from Akamai which Apple works with might be priming the pipe for such a situation. But this is just a minor Apple event which will probably focus exclusively on music and iPods. And as cool as WiFi on an iPod would be, I don’t see it happening this time out. If it does, I may have to break my promise to avoid buying Apple gear before year’s end.