Apple: New Core 2 Duo iMacs, Mystery

Sorry for the nightmarish mixed metaphor, but Apple plays its cards so close to the vest that you've got to be really good at reading the tea leaves to figure out its chess moves. Last week, there were rumors of an Apple press event on September 12th. Sites like ThinkSecret said it would involve new iMacs. Yesterday, the September 12th event was confirmed as happening. And today...Apple announced new iMacs.

The new machines sound neat--fast Intel Core 2 Duo chips are standard across the line, and the 17-inch model now starts at $999, bringing the starting price at retail for an iMac under a grand for the first time in awhile. And there's a new $1999 top-of-the-line version with a brighter 24-inch screen (on paper, at least, that sounds pretty spectacular--I'll have to check it out).

With the revised iMac lineup already here--these machines begin shipping today--the question of just what Apple is going to announce next week gets even more mysterious. Considering that the event invite sports the entertainment-themed prhase "It's Showtime," but the big news on consumer desktops seems to have happened this week, it doesn't seem like a wild guess to predict that Apple has something else significant up its sleeve, and that that something (or somethings) is most likely iPod-centric.

Scuttlebutt so far doesn't seem to involve a "real" video iPod with a larger screen; such a device is supposedly on its way, but maybe not until 2007. Apple could still surprise us and release a true 6G iPod tomorrow, but if it doesn't, it seems likely that any upgrade to the full-size iPod will be a very incremental one (think larger hard drives). That still leaves the iPod Nano; there are rumors of higher-capacity models with metal cases. It wouldn't be startling if they featured some sort of video-playing capability, although even a Nano with more memory wouldn't have enough to be a very serious video handheld.

There's also plenty of speculation that the September 12th announcements will include news about movie downloads from the iTunes Music Store. Could be, but you'd think that when that big annoucement happens, Apple will want to couple it with significant news about video-related hardware. Maybe that means we'll see some sort of AirPort Express-like wireless media streamer that can do movies.

That leaves the usual laundry list of Apple Products That People Would Like to See that could get announced on the 12th, including the iPhone, but that too seems more likely to show up next year. You can probably cross one potential product off the list, though--today also brought news that Apple is giving the Mac Mini a speed bump and making Core Duo chips standard across that line, so it seems unlikely that we'll see new Media Center-like Minis next week.

Okay, I'm done guessing for now. I'll be at the September 12th event and will report back here, whether the morning is relatively uneventful or involves bombshells that nobody's predicting yet. (Right now, either scenario seems equallly plausible...)