“Let’s Rock” is the tagline for Tuesday’s press event that Apple is teasing as a major product announcement. The question for the legions of Apple speculators is: What will Apple CEO Steve Jobs announce?
At the top of the speculation list is a new, significantly redesigned iPod nano. Other rumors include a major upgrade to Apple’s iTunes software or the launch of music and video subscriptions to the online iTunes Store.
The event will take place in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a larger venue than the Moscone Center, where Apple’s San Francisco events usually take place. And Apple has been encouraging journalists from around the country to fly into San Francisco for this one. So expectations are high.
Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer mentioned at Apple’s last conference call that this quarter’s revenue would be affected by a “future product transition,” Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel pointed out.
Sorrel predicted that new iPods would not merit the hype Apple is generating and that the event will unveil a major change in iTunes, featuring a “genius” feature and sidebar and perhaps some sort of Pandora-like music-recommendation feature. The genius feature would build playlists from “songs in your library that go great together,” according to Digg founder and Apple rumormonger Kevin Rose.
Even more radical would be a subscription option for the iTunes Store, a move the record labels have long wanted and Jobs has rejected.
If new iPods are not as exciting as the iPhone 3G or the MobileMe service, they are ultimately more important to Apple, Tom Kravitz at Cnet News wrote. “The iPod represents Apple to more people around the world than any other Apple product by far,” Kravitz wrote.
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