By this time next week all the gadgets and doo-hickeys introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show will be but fleeting memories, but tech journalists and aficionados will still be talking about Steve Jobs’ Macworld Expo keynote address announcements.  Discussing Apple’s newly announced products and services will also be first up on the agenda at next week’s MMOOS (Maine Macintosh Owners & Operators Society, our local Apple User Group) meeting.

We’ll meet Tuesday, January 15^th, at 6:30 PM in the large meeting room in Bldg. 25 of Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick.  As the Macworld keynote is the morning of the 15th, our crack MMOOS staff will spend the afternoon feverishly gathering and parsing information on the latest and greatest Apple goodies.  For directions to this rare glimpse into the tech future, and more information about MMOOS, check out our website at mmoos.net.

Many analysts predict that Apple’s Macworld announcements will include “one more thing” - an ultra-light, ultra-slim, ultra-cool “subnotebook” portable Mac, possibly with a 13-inch LED screen and powered by Intel’s new line of 45 nanometer (in layman’s terms, “very small yet powerful, using less electricity and generating less heat”) processors.  These new subcompacts may use “hybrid” hard drives – part traditional rotating platters and part solid-state RAM - for faster bootup times and more efficient energy use.

There is really no room in an ultra-slim notebook for an optical (CD/DVD) drive, so earlier this week an Apple patent surfaced for a home  “docking station” - essentially a hollowed-out iMac enclosure that houses a display, optical drive, and bigger, traditional hard drive.  Simply slide the new “MacBook nano” (or whatever they decide to call it) into a slot on the side, and the enclosure becomes a fully-functional desktop.

This week, in a somewhat out-of-character move, Apple made some “early bird” product announcements a full week ahead of the keynote (to make room for more good stuff next week), I assume.  Creative professionals (graphics, video, audio) will welcome the fastest Mac ever built – a Mac Pro desktop with eight screaming cores of computing power as standard equipment, and up to twice as fast as its predecessor .  Two quad-core Intel Xeon processors running as high as 3.2 GHz.  In addition to higher clock cycles, the new Mac Pros sport large and fast cache and bus architectures (the highways and byways of data into and out of the processors).