Surprise! Big Apple Surprise Coming Next Week.

The summer’s most closely guarded secret is revealed. Behind the scenes reports say something could happen. Maybe. Really.

Apple is about to surprise and rock the world with… something… perhaps on September 12… maybe involving a Mac, or an iPod, or movies, or something.

Back in August Arik Hesseldahl of BusinessWeek Online said that Apple will launch movie downloads on iTunes Music Store by mid-September.

That prediction was precipitated by another from BusinessWeek about Wal-Mart being upset that Apple would sell movies online.

What was Apple’s official response to Wal-Mart selling music online? I mean, besides the huge yawn? Anybody?

This wasn’t the rumor that started the rumor mongers churning their rumor mills. It was Apple Expo Paris and no Steve Jobs, and that rumor goes back a few months.

After all, it was the French who wanted to outlaw Apple’s iTunes DRM, FairPlay, and open it for everyone to make everything interchangeable.

”Hey, Jacques! How come my toaster won’t play music that’s on my iPod?”

Monsieur Jobs was understandably miffed at the French so no one should be surprised that just about the time the Apple Expo Paris kicks into gear, sans Jobs, Jobs himself will kick into gear a few ”one more thing...” things.

From Cupertino, CA and London, UK, no less.

OK, so there’s movies coming to the iTunes Music Store. It doesn’t take a genius or a card-carrying member of a nearby parallel universe to figure that one out. It’s all in the timing.

ThinkSecret says it’s all coming together September 12.

What’s coming together? Whatevere Kasper at AppleInsider says is coming, which is pretty much the same as ThinkSecret which is pretty much the same as what MacOSRumors said.

I"m not sure who said it first, but the dates are all the same. September 4th is when they said September 12th is the day Steve will say, “One more thing...”

Or, something to that effect. What’s on the list of things to expect?

The big money is on movie downloads from the iTunes Music Store, though there’s some concern about the price tags for said movies, and the number of movies, and the number of big name movie studios, and the number of movies.

I haven’t read much about the quality of the movies, having gone on record as not being overly pleased with the video quality of TV shows and music videos from iTMS.

So, it’s movies. That’s logical. It was never if, but when. If movies, how about new iPods?

I’ll buy into that camp assuming the dues are next to nothing. New iPods, larger screens, bigger hard drives, better battery capacity, and a new feature or two.

What’s really needed is a much much larger screen and snazzy click wheel that shows up on the screen when your finger gets near it.

That’d be cool, but that’s been talked and bandied about for many months and not likely to show.

Mac360’s own Forums moderator, Natalia Nowak, writing for NoodleMac last week, pointed out a huge gap in the Mac product line-- right between the high end iMac and low end Mac Pro.

What better to fill the Mac product void than introducing a brand spanking new 23-inch iMac HD with shiny new Intel Merom Core 2 Duo processors?

Will this really be a big surprise if everyone knows about it already? That brings me to the infamous…

”One more thing...” Come to think of it, there hasn’t been a ”one more thing...” in quite awhile. I don’t remember the last one, though we’ve had a few shockers.

Remember the Mac mini? Intel Inside? Boot Camp? MacBook and Mac Pro and MacBook Pro?

In summary, everyone’s expecting the expected and paying no attention to the unexpected. Move downloads? Sure, why not? New iMac and new, speedier Intel chips? Sure. We want them every six months.

New line of iPods with more memory, more hard drive space, bigger screens? Sure. I’ll take one.

But ”one more thing...?” I wonder what that could be. Any idea from you on what to expect of the unexpected?

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