I think the rumor mills are missing the boat as to what will appear January.
I found out about the improved Intel virtualization support about a year ago and that the virtualization's software component was open source and that Intel had funded the startup that wrote the software.
The article that pointed me to this info claimed this virtualization made the OS obsolete but my take on the info was that it made the processor obsolete and actually greatly increased the importance of the OS.
This kind of self obsoleting behavior is typical of technology companies that are running behind the curve and loosing their perspective on the business side of their sector of the market.
So I wrote a suggestion to Apple that this could be used to make use of artificial intelligence in an OS in a fairly simple and straight forward way.
For every instance of OSs launch two instances of OSs of Mac OS X, one that the user uses and then a second that runs at the level just below the virtualization software and have it monitor and build statistics on the code level and what the user does and then based on these parameters the "Observing" OS could self-configure or self-optimize at the system and at compiler level -- a self-optimizing system.
I got really excited just because this setup would be great for installing debugger code that could just stay there all of the time in the observing system and still be quite transparent -- I am a tester so those things excite me !!!
Then Apple released Tiger and Jobs gave a mysterious reference to the next system, Jaguar, making it sound like it would be a real cool update.
And then Jobs announced the intended move to Intel, something I have been telling them to do for years.
And now on the eve of the Intel transition the rumor mills seem to think the Mac-mini is going to Intel and be a multi-media HDTV box without having any specialized integrations with new products from Apple.
I think Apple might ship something TOTALLY new and revolutionary this time !!!
I think the new Mac-mini is likely to support WiFi for video and stereo sound and instead of Apple shipping new iBooks the INTELigent iBooks and perhaps powerbook rumors are actually confused with thin-client monitors that will receive the WiFi video and be a very thin and light weight remote computing client, touch-screen monitor with a BT keyboard add-on, to the INTELigent Mac-mini which will be upgradable to high-end power.
It is the power efficiency of the new Intel processors and perhaps some of the new small WiFi cards that make this kind of remote computing screen good enough to be an Apple product. MS and others tried to implement this about two years ago but they all failed for some reason.
When the NeXT Mac OS ships it will support virtualization that will allow the thin-client Macs to run without interrupting the INTELigent Mac-minis streaming music to the Mac Stereo and video to an HDTV.
And at some point Mac OSs will become self optimizing using the virtualization scheme I described perhaps in conjunction with the code-morphing software that Apple has already said it will use to create INTELigent Mac code.
I would not be surprised if Apple did not announce its special use of virtualization initially since it is the sort of thing you would keep a trade secret for a while until your lead over your rivals gets LARGE !!!
