There are a couple of analyst rumors doing the rounds at present that are best described as … questionable.
First, we have Brian White claim (via VentureBeat) that the key focus of the long-rumored iWatch is as a control for home automation systems.
You may recall that Mr White is a man who likes his remotes: he predicted back in April that the Apple HDTV (which he always claims is going to be released in the next quarter or two) would be controlled by an iRing …
So, that’s an iRing to control the TV, and an iWatch to control everything else. Oh, and if you want to know how many iWatches will be sold, Gene Munster has the answer there, based on picking a random price and asking a random number of random consumers (via CNET).
Keep in mind, Munster in his latest call missed the iPhone sales number by a staggering 50%, predicting 4-5 million when the real number turned out to be 9 million.
[tweet https://twitter.com/llsethj/status/387204779463942144]
Then there’s talk of a 12-inch Retina MacBook Air. This one comes from a DisplaySearch blog post which uses “supply chain research” to create an entire table of product predictions, many of them confidently naming a specific quarter (the iPhone 6 will be out in Q2 next year, apparently):
All that’s missing is the release date for the iRing.
With widespread speculation that Apple will finally be forced to give in to the trend for larger-screen phones, and sporadic rumors of larger iPads, everyone is getting in on the action when it comes to writing screen sizes on a bunch of PostIt notes and sticking them to a dartboard. DisplaySearch apparently decided to throw the MacBook Air into the mix too, for added fun.
A Retina version of the the 11- and 13-inch MacBook Air has long been predicted, once Apple can get costs down to the right ballpark for the lower-cost machines, but the 12-inch prediction seems to have about as much of a solid grounding as the rest of the table. Consider it intended for entertainment purposes only.
- Poll: Which iWatch concepts are you a fan of? (9to5mac.com)
- Microsoft pretends to be a ‘fly on the wall’ in Cupertino, pokes fun at new iPhones (9to5mac.com)
- Report claims both likely & unlikely display changes for future Apple devices (9to5mac.com)
- Apple issues MacBook Air EFI firmware update with fixes for Boot Camp (9to5mac.com)
- Roundup: The iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, and wildcards for tomorrow’s Apple event (9to5mac.com)
- 3D motion sensor promises instant sports analysis on your iPhone (9to5mac.com)
- iPhone 5s and 5c rolling out to more than 25 new countries on Oct. 25, a dozen more Nov. 1 (9to5mac.com)