We rolled together the rumors that were making the rounds a month ago for new product announcements by Apple for April. We expected an anniversary surprise of sorts that never materialized. The iPhone has reportedly gone back for a complete redo and won’t make it until fall or the holiday season. No new video iPod has appeared with the bigger screen and a new iTunes movie store. Not even a new iBook replacement. All we got was a 17″ MacBookPro and the continued migration to universal apps.

So what now? It still makes sense that the iBook replacement must be replaced soon to hit the education market buying season sweet spot. Some reports suggest it will come in May and will be a single 13″ widescreen form factor and use the same CORE chips that are in the other recent releases. There are even some suggestions that it might come in multiple colors, or at least iPod black and white. There is some discussion of a MacBook thin coming soon too that may be a subnotebook.

Others have taken a look at Apple’s patent filings over the last several months and are suggesting that an Apple version of the UMPC (Microsoft’s Origami project) may be in the works. UMPC News today details a pretty good case for this. Check out our earlier post on the touch sensitive screen demo that we loved, as it looks a lot like the multiple finger gesture controls from one of these patent apps.

The consensus is that the desktop replacement will come with Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in August. In the iPod world folks are speculating that the Nano will get a major overhaul for the Holidays, even while there seems to be no real consensus now for the new video iPod introduction date.

Intel is reportedly accelerating their timetable for introduction of the next generation of chips, which might mean a bit quicker than expected revision cycle for the Macs and iPods over the next year.

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Posted by DB in Blogs, Gadgets, Mac, Opinion, iPod