Unconfirmed Rumors

Next week, Apple head hon­cho Steve Jobs will stand up on stage at Moscone Cen­ter in San Fran­cisco dur­ing the company’s annual World Wide Developer’s Con­fer­ence and announce a new iPhone that every­one has already seen.

The ice cream sand­wich, as our lab boys are call­ing it (even avail­able in two fla­vors, choco­late and vanilla) takes the famil­iar and comfy design of the cur­rent iPhone, sits it under a steam roller and adds a new front-facing cam­era so you can become even more annoyed with AT&T when you can’t com­plete your video conference.

The fact that every­one already knows about it means that per­haps Mr. Jobs’s biggest sur­prise is no sur­prise at all.

Or does it?

We’d like to posit some com­pletely unfounded and spu­ri­ous rumors in an attempt to short-circuit any actual sur­prises by announc­ing them here and now, even though all of these are com­pletely made up.

iTunes gets a new name

When iTunes debuted, it was meant only as a music hub for your iPod. A way to man­age all the music you’ve been ille­gally down­load­ing in one place. But now, iTunes is also man­ag­ing your iPhone and iPad (and prob­a­bly what­ever future iDe­vices the com­pany coes up with) so leav­ing the ‘tunes’ part of it in there makes lit­tle sense.

The new name? We had a dick­ens of a time (rather, our mar­ket­ing depart­ment did) com­ing up with a new mon­icker that encom­passes every­thing the appli­ca­tion man­ages now. It came down to two names. The winner?

iYou! iYou allows you (being you, or I, if you’re me) to man­age all your you stuff, from apps to docs to movies to pet groom­ing sup­plies (using the new iPet). iYou is ever-present and talked to your iPad, iPhone, iPod, iWork, iMovie, and even iGarage iBand (also renamed).

The los­ing name? iI. Pro­nounced “Eee!” as in Wii.

New OS X interface

The com­pany line is that WWDC 2010 will be all about the iPhone oper­at­ing sys­tem. The com­pany already intro­duced a bunch of new con­cepts for iPhone 4.0, but what about OS X? Will they really com­pletely ignore their other oper­at­ing sys­tem entirely?

Of course not! And keep­ing with its stance to inno­vate and cre­ate the most ele­gant and usable inter­face pos­si­ble in a com­puter OS, OS X 10.7 (code­named Pussy) will, shock­ingly, adopt many of the design prin­ci­ples intro­duced in Microsoft’s Win­dows 7!

I know!

The dock is gone, replaced with a series of mini-captures of every appli­ca­tion on your com­puter so you can see what they would look like if you opened them all. Con­ve­nient! And the win­dows all use opac­ity and trans­parency every­where so you can actu­ally see through one appli­ca­tion into the other, cre­at­ing an invis­i­ble and infi­nite desk­top on which every­thing is always visible.

Plus! OS Pussy’s new “snap” fea­ture will tile all your appli­ca­tions into similar-sized win­dows inside them­selves, and the long-suffering ‘Graphite’ inter­face has been com­pletely replaced with what’s dubbed ‘Candy Store,’ where every bevel is shiny, every drop shadow is soft and fuzzy, and the color scheme has been bor­rowed from Juicy Cou­ture, circa 2002. Think pink, everybody!

Another brand new mobile device

Everyone’s seen iPhone 4, already, but you didn’t think that was all the com­pany had up its sleeve, did you? Puh-shaw! Every­body knows mobile is the future, and that the future is mobile. And what is mobile? Mobile is mov­ing! Mobile is slim and sleek and fast and electromagnetic!

Pre­sent­ing iStick! While the iPad took an iPod Touch and ironed it out so it was big­ger and flat­ter, iStick rolls it into a doo­bie and lights it up! A magic wand for the future, iStick allows you to record your thoughts be speak­ing into one end, and lis­ten to them by stick­ing the other end in your ear. No key­board, no touch­ing, just you, a stick, and lots of words to post to your Face­book account or Twit­ter feed. Words, words, words! What could be simpler?

Also, they’ve come up with a bril­liant catch phrase for using the device: “Stick it!”

Apple tv replacement

Those of us die-hard Apple devo­tees know that Apple tv is kind of a stu­pid device. Even the com­pany calls it lit­tle more than a ‘hobby,’ though at nearly $300, that’s a bit more of a com­mit­ment than scrap-booking.

Some recent rumors sug­gest that they’re going to update or replace the cur­rent slap of hot-running alu­minum (seri­ously, you can use this thing as a grid­dle if you’re not actu­ally inter­ested in down­load­ing movies from iYou) with a slim device that has no on-board mem­ory and only two inputs; power + HDMI. It’ll run the iYou OS and grab every­thing from the cloud.

We call bull­shit! Instead, Apple will dou­ble the phys­i­cal size of the unit, add in 2 ter­abytes of hard drive space, include 17 ports (12 of which are USB 3) and make it into your “home port,” tying your Mac­Book, iMac, iPhone, iPod(s), iPhone(s), iPad(s) and iStick(s) together, all dongling off the back­side and upload­ing and down­load­ing into a cen­tral court­yard of data and pulling out what each one needs. You say WiFi is how every­thing should con­nect? No, my friends, if Apple knows one thing, it knows cables! And new con­nec­tors! Mini-displayport! Mini-DVI! Hyper-mini-tiny-HDMI with dou­ble dig­i­tal fire­wall pro­tec­tion that allows stu­dios and TV net­works to know exactly what you’re try­ing to rip off from them and allows them to erase things they don’t even own out of spite!

Apple tv? Gone. Intro­duc­ing Apple DMCA Hub! Con­trol­ling and polic­ing every­thing you’re watch­ing, lis­ten­ing to and read­ing, while mak­ing sure you know that you never owned any of it.

Steve­bot

This has been a long time com­ing and now they’re finally ready to reveal their most secret and super spe­cial invention.

Remem­ber when Steve dis­ap­peared for a while? And they said he was sick? And then that other guy took over for a while? And then Steve came back — only he looked… different?

That’s Steve­bot! And Apple is finally ready to explain the cre­ation of an ani­ma­tronic, low-maintenance, high-capacity android C.E.O. replace­ment vehi­cle. Steve­bot per­forms all the usual duties of a cor­po­rate offi­cer with­out the headaches of back-dated stock offers and try­ing to make excuses like “we’re only human” when mil­lions of bar­rels of toxic sludge inun­date your favorite shoreline.

Steve­bot is cheap, because only the head and hands need to be “human,” every­thing else is cov­ered up with denim and black turtle­necks. He only needs to move around a lit­tle on a stage, and some­times appear at cof­fee shops with other cor­po­rate exec­u­tive bots. Mean­while, Steve­bot frees up the real Steve to do all the more impor­tant things like destroy his­toric homes and park in hand­i­capped spots.

One more thing

We’ve exten­sively researched these find­ings and are pretty con­fi­dent that all of them, to some extent, are almost entirely true. We’ve already lubed up our ori­fices for new iStick inser­tion and can’t wait for the Apple media police to knock down our doors, ran­sack our apart­ments, deny us entrance and explain that it’s all for the good of cor­po­rate secrecy.

This is glass­dog! The last bas­tion of truth in a world of hyp­ocrites and liars.

Tags: Apple, genius, idiot, iPad, iPhone, iYou, Steve Jobs