Oh, One More Thing…C'mon Out Steve
With just days to go before the 25th Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco kicks off Tuesday morning, speculation about what Apple (AAPL) may or may not unveil during senior vice president Philip Schiller’s keynote address is mounting. Among the rumored possibilities:
- A preview of Snow Leopard, the next iteration of Mac OS X
- A long overdue update to the Mac Mini
- New iMacs
- A Time Capsule home media server
Beyond that, there are rumors of an Apple tablet circulating once again. And there’s been some chatter about an iPhone Nano, but analysts are skeptical that we’ll see such devices uncrated Tuesday. “Frankly, we would be a little surprised if there is a major announcement,” Shaw Wu, Kaufman Bros. senior research analyst, wrote in a note to investors last week. “However, there is always the likelihood that Apple may surprise and send a message that Apple is a much broader and deeper company than one person, even if he/she is a living legend.”
Of course, there’s also the possibility that the living legend himself may be the big announcement. Given all the morbid speculation these past few months, the best “one more thing” of all could be Jobs himself making a cameo appearance–with, or without, a new product. “The beauty of this scenario is its simplicity,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes at Apple 2.0. “There are only two possibilities: Either Jobs shows up or he doesn’t. If he does, and looks no worse than he did at the Spotlight on Notebooks special event in October, the audience will erupt with applause, investors will be reassured, and Apple’s share price will soar.”
And if he doesn’t show? Well, that’s another matter entirely and one that may begin to tell us whether or not concerns about Jobs’s eventual departure from the company–whenever that may be and whatever form it may take–have finally been baked into Apple’s share price.
