The annual MacWorld Expo kicks off this morning with Steve Jobs keynote address. Every year Jobs uses this venue to do a couple things. One, he discusses upcoming upgrades and improvements for existing Apple products (more RAM, more white plastic, etc.) Two, he often uses the opportunity to unveil Apple’s next “big product.” Last year it was the iPhone, which you may have heard about on every website in the fucking world.

Although Mac geeks like to speculate endlessly about what the big surprise will be, Jobs announcements often come completely out of the blue. He even has a little catchphrase, where after announcing all the minor products and upgrades he’ll make to leave the stage before turning and saying “Oh, and one more thing” before announcing the big surprise. Why so many people hang on the word of someone who channels Peter Falk during a speech is anyone’s guess. “And one more thing” is about as cool of a catchphrase as “You’re the man now, dawg,” albeit without the horrible cringe-inducing racism.

Anyways, I thought I’d examine some of the likeliest “surprises” Apple might have in store for us, and just for fun, throw in some baseless slander about Steve Jobs along the way.

Touchscreen MacBook or iMac
This is the most popular rumor floating around right now: Apple will release either an iMac or Macbook with a touchscreen built in. Some people reckon Apple may go a step further and release a keyboard-less tablet device – tablet devices being that market that’s floundered a bit in the last few years due to the fact that no-one anywhere wants a tablet device. The only people who’ve ever expressed any interest in tablet computing are artists. Fortunately for Apple, as a group, artists are not known for being terribly smart with their money - although they’re also not known for having much of it in the first place. It’s difficult to imagine them, or anyone else, scooping up an inevitably pricey tablet Mac in any significant numbers.

Fun baseless Steve Jobs slander: Steve Jobs desire to have touchscreens installed in every computer is partly due to his nickname around Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, “Old Semen-Mouse.”

iBook
Given Apple’s extensive experience with their iTunes store, and the semi-positive response people have given the Amazon Kindle, it’s possible Apple may want to get into the ebook market. Although it’s still uncertain how large demand for ebooks is, Apple would have some pretty strong advantages over it’s competition, assuming that it doesn’t release the ugliest device ever created.

Fun baseless Steve Jobs slander: Jobs has been experimenting with a prototype version of the iBook for several months now. He particularly enjoys reading the series of Goosebumps books by R.L. Stine, and finds the ability of the iBook to be used one handed particularly useful while relentlessly masturbating to the same.

Sub-notebook
Essentially an Apple version of the Asus EeePC, this would likely take the form of a very small Macbook that forgoes a hard drive for a few gigs of solid state memory. Sub-notebooks are kind of a hot thing right now, but a key element of them is that they’re supposed to be cheap. And “cheap” has never really been Apple’s thing, in much the same way that “healthy” has never really been bacon’s thing. In general, Apple avoids the low end of the computing market, preferring the higher margins available when selling more powerful machines, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stray away from that now.

Fun baseless Steve Jobs slander: Steve Jobs has non-consensual sex with dead animals.

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Chris Bucholz is a writer and a robot. His personal blog, robotmantheblog.com contains a great deal of other humor articles, all of dubious quality and taste.

Usually we leave the blogging up to the experts (that guy who assumes everyone has an unhealthy obsession with porn, and that other guy who assumes everyone has an unhealthy obsession with Starpulse) but Cracked.com’s Editorial We had to take a moment to share some big news with you (that’s right We get capitalized and you don’t. Start a multi-billion dollar humor operation and then we’ll talk).

CRACKED.com announced today that a full .25% of their website’s traffic comes from web surfers using Apple’s iPhone.

“We couldn’t believe it when we saw the numbers in Google Analytics,” Cracked assistant editor David Wong said. “For every 100 people that visit CRACKED, one-fourth of one of them is iPhoning it up. Probably just the head, one arm and maybe part of the torso. It’s really the only way they can log in, the poor, deformed freaks.”

Editor Jack O’Brien expressed little surprise at the website’s veritable iOnslaught of iTraffic. “The typical Cracked.com user is a man on the make. He needs his comedy in numbered lists because he’s busy closing deals and having sexual intercourse with women,” O’Brien said before putting down the company’s ad pitch script to push an intern’s head into a fart.

Editorial assistant Dan O’Brien predicted that, “In the future when everyone in the world has an iPhone, one fourth of the world will be visiting Cracked every single day,” though, given O’Brien’s history with wildly inaccurate predictions, (flying cars in ‘93, bears that can teach math by ‘97, and a gay, robot president in 2004,), this comment should be taken with a grain of salt.

The Cracked staff expressed tentative plans to ask Apple for “a cut of some of that iPhone loot.” Steve Jobs could not be reached for comment.

Awesome Video Of The Day

iPhonemania Officially Jumps The Shark

I’ll admit it: When the iPhone first came out, I completely lost my shit. My friends were parading their new gadgets in front of me, and I, consummate sucker for anything new and moderately pointless, was ready to shell out big bucks to get one of my own. Can you blame me? It was like aliens from some remote and futuristic planet (one 3 or 4 years more advanced than ours) had landed and brought their crazy, otherworldly small electronics with them. It has a TOUCHSCREEN! How cool is that?!

Then as the months went by a strange thing started to happen. Whenever I found myself in an idiotic argument, someone would whip out their iPhone and definitively end it. “No way, dude - England is DEFINITELY smaller than Illinois,” I’d say, and within minutes, BOOM: “England itself is smaller, but the United Kingdom AS A WHOLE is bigger.” It doesn’t matter where you are: iPhones give you the ability to end any disagreement. What does that mean? It means the death of The Retarded Bar Argument. Do you really want to live in a world where you can’t spout off misinformation at a bar without getting fact-checked on Wikipedia?

This video of two douchebags dancing around like morons seals the deal: iPhonemania has officially jumped the shark. Maybe if the iPhone was just released a few weeks ago these costumes would be understandable, but c’mon guys: Lots of people have iPhones now. They’ve been around for a while, and they’re widely commercially available. Did I dress up as my Samsung T209 for Halloween? No. Wanna know why? Because it’s JUST A FUCKING PHONE. Time to move on.

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Greenpeace has launched its equivalent of an all-out assault—a nicely worded note sent with a bouquet of hydroponically grown roses—on Apple computers for failing to make the iPhone free of environmental toxins. Turns out the phones contain PVC, BFR, and untold amounts of other deadly acronyms. They even made a nifty video to show you the dark, evil inner workings of that little mass of concentrated cancer you’re holding.

Specifically, Greenpeace representatives have said that the company is irresponsible for failing to provide a cell phone buyback program like environmental all stars Nokia, Motorolla and Sony-Ericsson, and for releasing products that are “toxic to reproduction” and can “interfere in the sexual reproduction of mammals.” So you should probably stop rubbing the iPhone on your genitals, hard as that may be.

I was particularly concerned about this news since a friend of mine just purchased an iPhone, and I naturally feared for his junk. Fortunately, after some research into what “toxic to reproduction” means exactly, I discovered that the compounds in the iPhone are only harmful to the development and fertility of mammals. So if you’re a full grown man with no plans for kids, load up some photos of your favorite celebrity and rub away.

But by the same token, you’re not going to want to rub your iPhone on, say, your kids’ genitals, although if you’re doing that, you’ve got much bigger problems to worry about. You also wouldn’t want to put the iPhone near a fetus, which is almost certainly going to hurt the sales of Apple’s proposed iSonogram plugin.

In the meantime, Greenpeace continues to pressure Apple to make environmentally responsible decisions with pun-laden rhetoric like “time will tell if Jobs’ promises of a greener Apple will bear any fruit,” and Apple continues to make billions of dollars. Jobs promises that Apple will “soon be ahead of most of its competitors” in regard to being environmentally friendly, which is the equivalent of saying “sure, sure, we’ll get to it. Well, most of it. Probably. Unless The Office is on.”

By the way, if you happen to be reading this post on an iPhone that’s situated near your genitals: How ironic is THAT?!