Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
My guess still is that it will have this basic functionality but not be anything close to an Ibook or any Mac. It would need a Mac to Sync to. With just basic stripped down hardware I would put it at a sub $400 device. This would help separate it from the base Imac model.
With this functionality it would kill other PDA/Handhelds/Nokia 9500 etc. All these devices are in this price range.
The key here for Apple would be to create a significant difference in the user experience to ensure that it would not compete against the Mobile Macs.

Tuesday will tell...
 
re: xhypertensionx and traveler comments

with apple and other companies pushing devices more than networking or even desktop computers, a good field for a techie may be getting into designing these devices or programming for these devices

at westtech job fair in silicon valley, just before the tech slowdown, the hot jobs were electronic engineers and web page designers and i am sure the web page designer thing is definitely out

i have rarely met someone with a computer science degree in silicon valley or anywhere else and this is, in my opinion, for two reasons

1) no college is practical and up to date and especially in such a fassssst moving field...look at the IT industry's leaders...jobs, dell, gates, and ellison...the four legs that hold up the table of high tech...and all college dropouts...and its not just them, there was the woz (who later got a teaching degree), some founders of sun, and that billionaire napster kid who is not old enough to drink even though his platinim parachute could buy budweiser

and yes, there are college degreed ceo types and five come to mind... the 2 founders of yahoo, the 2 founders of cisco, and the head of hp...i would say these 5 were involved in losing more money than any five people in the history of man, or at least high tech in the valley

2) by the time my programmer friends get through 4 or even 5 years of coding, they are ready to get naked and join a nudist colony in santa cruz...too many ex-programmers out there, and the ones i know in the field studied art and spent years starving or something like that and they are yet to get burned out from endless coding

and maybe studying farsi and asian economics could land a steady job since that area of the world will need some restructuring after we bomb it the same way we bombed and rebuilt germany and japan (who some say, tongue in cheek, really won the war...i mean, what would you rather have... a ford or a lexus or a bmw ?)

...but back to the digital devices thing, i think there might be a future for techies in the hardware and software sides of making these devices, but for how long nobody knows

i would not stake apple's future on desktop computer production forever and maybe this new device will become one of many and represent apple's main source of income for years to come

...so i will just sit here and enjoy the infighting between us all on the tech speculations of what this groundbreaking device will be and now i have to admit, i can't wait to see what steve has for us
 
Re: Breakthrough?

Originally posted by Dink Thifferent
People have their hopes up, and expect a real breakthrough.

I expect an MP3 player that's cured of its deficiencies: it should have a HD, so you're not restricted to some ridiculous 64-megabyte storage; plus the ability to program it from your Mac and compile playlists etc., and possibly the ability to save sound input as MP3.

So: I wouldn't be surprised by a more-of-an-old-idea-executed-better-than-the-rest-than-a-real-breakthrough-kind of device, but I hope it won't be one.

Well, actually this exists already. The Archos jukebox 6000 and the recorder. They do what you say and do it correctly (if only because Apple includes USB IDE FAT32 drivers with MacOS, which allows for the Archos to be mounted).

I would really want it to be a PDA, if not for anything else that I always wanted a Newton and could never buy one and I can see that nowadays no device still does what the Newton came out-of-the-box doing.

Still, in the end I believe none of the two main speculations (a music-hub for the house, controlled via iTunes, connected via AirPort, connected to your stereo devices or stand-alone or the PDA version) is the actual device to be unveiled. The first is too vague and too modé to be true, while the second is too close to a Mac and implies entering an already crowded market.

Eduo

Eduo
 
just something else

this kind of goes with the glorified audiotron idea... i see something with a cd drive included that will automatically rip a disc to mp3 (or aiff) and store it on the hard drive, thus being able to be shared all over the house. might help reduce scratching of cds...

now, if it could do the same for a dvd...
 
Not a Mac?

Simple. It won't be a Mac. It will be a Windows PC.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.