Prediction for Apple's October 12 media event: Intel-based Powerbooks and iPod Minis that have no hard drives (UPDATED Oct.12/05)

As usual, there is a lot of anticipation around Apple’s media event planned for this upcoming week and I thought that I would weigh in with my own predictions for the week ahead.

My guess is that Apple is going to release the first Intel based Powerbook. Why? Because they have been doing “updates” to the Powerbook line on average every six months but the current one was updated in January 2005, more than 8 months ago. And they have had to do minor updates because they couldn’t squeeze any more speed out of the G4 chips so the updates have really been quite minor for the past couple of revisions.

That is why my guess is that “one more thing” is going to be that Apple has already built an Intel laptop in a new laptop shell (or even the same laptop shell) and that this is what they will be presenting this week.

Additionally, with flash RAM continuing to come down in price, Apple wanting to buy as much of it as possible so as to exclude other companies from doing the large flash RAM approach that they are using in the Nano, and my guess that they actually make more gross margin on those than they do on the hard-drive based models (I have no proof of this), I am guessing that Apple will release an updated Mini with a smaller form factor that holds 6 or 10GB of data.

I really doubt all this nonsense about video iPods. I just can’t see it. Video is not that useful to people.

Let’s see how my guesses do in a few more days!

UPDATE: I suck. Boris wins (sort of).As somebody said below, I’m not going to quit my day-job to become a futurist or psychic for the computer business.

I love the new iMac including the iSight, the remote, and the attempt to steal some thunder from Windows Media Center.

In a “let’s walk before we crawl” way, Apple selling videos makes a lot of sense. It will give them the experience in building out video on demand services. By the time they really get that back-end solid, bandwidth will have continued to increase to the point that it will be feasible to start downloading movies in MPEG 4 if not HD.

One major glaring obvious hole in their Media Center rip-off ploy – why no DVR???