As the audience settles into their seats at the great World Wide Developers Conference in Cupertino, CA, the air is palpating with excitement. The lights grow dim and an opaque partition slowly rises to reveal a gigantic digital screen above the stage. The audience cant their torsos a little closer, imperceptibly, in their chairs and hang on with clamped breath and pinched buttocks for Apple's CEO and pitchman wunderkind Steve Jobs to take stage. Everyone has been scouring the blogs, starting office pools, and chattering non-stop about the potential announcements at this year's event. Not surprisingly, Jobs enters the stage in his usual attire--mock turtleneck, jeans, and sneakers. A hush befalls the eager crowd as Jobs begins his proselytization:

I want to thank David Pogue for that marvelous lead-in. David Pogue of the New York Times, everyone! (Audience applauds. Jobs takes a sip of bottled water) First I want to say 6 million iPhones and counting. Wow! That's just incredible. (Whoops, Hollers. Audience giggling with excitement for the big announcement) Now I bet you're wondering what's next. I know. I DO have the internet (Holds up running 2G iPhone with Macrumors blog displayed. Polite, nerdy laughter emanates from the seats).

A while ago I thought to myself 'I wonder how we can keep Apple as a major player in the market over the next 5 years?'. Technology is increasing at an exponential pace. Consumer demand and desire is becoming harder to predict. What will be the next big thing, the next must-have toy for the businessman, the student, the teenager? Well I have the answer, and the answer is 3G.

Thats right, Apple's next big product is the 3Gigabyte iPod shuffle.

Featuring a new sleek, portable design, multiple colors for maximum style, and extended battery life, the 3Gig Shuffle is set to revolutionize the way we listen to music, and all in a compact package for a low price. Featuring an additional gigabyte of storage space over the 2 gig shuffle, 30 extra minutes of battery life, and an adjustable lanyard dongle, the new shuffle is slated to be Apple's most talked about product of all time (begins slide-show)

After conducting multiple double-blind research tests on consumer groups, we've souped up this puppy with some of today's hottest colors. Off-white (slide). Taupe (slide). Ochre (slide). Brackish (slide). And finally Grape (slide).

While the 3G shuff still does not feature a screen or a touch-wheel, nor does it allow you to select the songs you wish to listen to, we put some of our top-tech guys working round the clock on some cool new features that are going to blow you away. Lets see what they came up with.

First, we decided to do away with the skip-song feature on the front in order to make room for a new button: the iTap (slide). What does the iTap do? Well, it provides you with a seamlessly integrated metronomic scale function with realtime audiowave synthesis. In other words, this little guy tells you the beats per minute of the song you are listening to.

If that doesn't rock your world, this next feature will.

An all-new proprietary headphone jack (slide).

That's right. After much hard work and deliberation, we realized that only the best and truly soundworthy headphones that exist in the world right now are the Apple earbuds. Which is why we soldered on an additional ring around the headphone jack to ensure that those buds are the ONLY headphones you use to listen to your music at the optimal level. We wouldn't want music fans to hear their tunes purchased through the iTunes store any other way.

Oh yeah, and to ensure that listeners are receiving top-notch audio quality, we made the sure that new 3gig shuffle only plays authorized, DRM-encrypted music purchased from the iTunes store.



The Zune Killer, Unveiled



Finally, we've added a .0000000005 megapixel camera to the outside of the shuffle (slide). This gadget is a "snap" for taking great pics on the go. Simply point the shuffle, guesstimate if anything is in the frame at all, click a complex sequence of buttons, connect to your Mac with a special firewire cable (sold seperately), download the latest version of iLife '08 and separate drivers for the shuffle, import your photo, re-expand the compressed file via a 3rd-party expander, drag and drop the file into iPhoto, blow up the file to a viewable size, and presto, you've got a picture, hopefully, of something or someone, possibly. It's a great, compact solution for wonderful pictures and I've been using it at family gatherings for a while now.

You guys, this product is great. Go to your nearest Apple store and pick one up. They're only $299 with a 3 year .Mac account contract. Speaking of .Mac, guess what!

(continues on...)