The iPhone 5, 4S, iPad 3 And More

This is based on speculation and my opinions on the future of Apple products. I know people at Apple but they don't give me any information.

1. 15" & 17" MacBook Pro refresh. The next iteration of these two laptops will include a removal of their optical drive to decrease thickness and overall weight. They won't have soldered on flash memory like the MacBook Air but I bet an SSD drive will be the standard configuration.

2. 13" MacBook Pro will slowly fade into that good night. The "Pro" line will be mostly designated by size and a 13" MBP is the odd-man-out.

3. 11" & 13" MacBook Airs will be Apple's bread and butter laptops and will get faster processors and better batteries as time goes on. No PC manufacturer can beat Apple on the price of an "ultrabook" even if Intel dumps tons of money into the arena. The Airs are selling like crazy so I can see Apple doing nice updates every year or so.

4. The iPhone 5 will come out in October and will be thinner, have a larger screen (but same resolution), and will be much speedier than the iPhone 4. Hopefully with more RAM, too. The screen will be closer to the right and left sides of the phone and will take up a greater overall surface area compared to iPhone 4.

5. An iPhone 4S will be released at the same time as iPhone 5. This will be made of slightly cheaper components so Apple can sell it for $99 on a 2-year contract. Mostly same dimensions as current iPhone 4 but potentially with more RAM or a faster processor. The big deal is this will be sold to Chinese carriers.

6. How many times does Apple have to say that this year is "the year of iPad 2" for people to understand that an iPad 3 won't come until next year? iPad 3 will have a screen with 2048x1536 resolution at the same physical dimension as the iPad 2. Form-factor will mostly be the same except the home button will look more closely like the upcoming iPhone 5's wider button. It'll likely have more RAM and a faster processor. It could also cost more than existing iPad 2 and then Apple could keep making iPad 2s but price it $50-$100 lower per model to stay attractive at the low end and kill Android tablets that try to undercut.

7. Mac Pro gets killed and replaced by a new type of desktop machine or configuration, perhaps just some Mac Mini-like boxes Thunderbolted together for hyper-fast processing. Apple is caring less and less about the professional end nowadays and more about the prosumer end so a product revamp here aligns well.

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