Apple developers' conference may see gaps filled in PowerMac, Ipod product lines

San Francisco (CA) - An entire industry has been formed around managing the guessing game of what Apple will announce next. But as with any industry that constitutes a good part of the American economy, when speculation becomes part of the business, meeting the expectations of the best speculators can be interpreted by the market at large as a disappointment. So the question starts to form in the mind of Apple enthusiasts, in advance of Monday's Worldwide Developers' Conference: If CEO Steve Jobs unveils just a new line of PowerMacs featuring, say, Core 2 Duo processors replacing Power G5s, and just a new line of iPod nanos with 8 GB of NAND flash at the top of the line, and just a first peak at the "Leopard" version of Mac OS X...will that be enough?

What many in the Apple community would like to see is something they're calling an "iPhone," which would essentially boil down to an iPod with communications capabilities. Statements made by Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer during a recent quarterly conference call with analysts, essentially saying his company isn't "sitting back and doing nothing" while the communications industry passes it by, were interpreted by financial analysts including Bank of America on Monday as a clear indication that Apple is working on some sort of portable communications device.

Some users are apparently so anxious for such a device that they've actually created mock-up advertisements in the classic Apple style (a derivative of the classic Volkswagen style), and circulated them across the Web along with messages on the order of, "Wouldn't this be neat?"

Of course, those drapes could be obscuring a cool, new case to go along with the speculative Core 2 Duo-based PowerMacs that comprise the "safe bet" for next week.

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