Apple to Debut iTunes.com, Mac Pro and MacBook Air Refreshes at WWDC?
The big news coming out of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2010 in early June will almost certainly be a next-generation iPhone, a device with specs much like those leaked earlier this spring. But there may be a few other announcements as well. The next version of the Mac OS X, perhaps. And beyond that, some news about the Mac and iTunes.
In an inspired bit of entrail reading this morning, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu says Apple (AAPL) may have a libretto of big WWDC announcements. “Other announcements we are picking up that could potentially be made are iTunes.com, a web-based version of its iTunes client, and new Mac refreshes with faster processors and graphics, namely the Mac Pro and MacBook Air, which were last refreshed in March and June 2009, respectively,” he wrote in a note to clients this morning.
An interesting bit of speculation. Certainly, it’s conceivable that the Mac Pro and MacBook Air get updated. As Wu notes, it has been quite a while since the last one. But iTunes.com, the online music service Apple is believed to be building on its Lala.com acquisition? That might be a bit of a stretch, as my colleague Peter Kafka reported in late April.
“Sources tell me that in the past few weeks, Apple has started signaling to the labels that it’s interested in a Web-based version of iTunes, its dominant music retail platform,” Kafka wrote on April 30. “But those conversations are preliminary at best. So if you’re expecting to hear about an ‘iTunes.com’ offering in the near future–like during Apple’s June 7 developer conference–you’re likely to be disappointed.”
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