Apple Macworld 2009 keynote: rumour roll call

You know there’s an Apple keynote speech pending when the tech news world goes quiet in anticipation of whatever Steve Jobs may have to announce later today at the Macworld Expo in San Fran

Though of course, Jobs won’t be announcing anything this year. Moreover, it’ll be the last Macworld appearance for Apple. So is it really worth all the anticipation? And exactly what are people anticipating? More after the cut.

The whole the Apple shebang should get underway at around 5pm GMT (9am PST; 11am CST) and the announcements that people are variously expecting include a 17in Macbook in a unibody casing, an iPhone Nano, an AT&T-friendly tethering plan for the iPhone and – the most recent bit of speculation (ie, it surfaced in the last 24 hours) – that Apple will cut the DRM chains from iTunes.

Of these, we’d say the most likely are the 17in unibody Macbook and the DRM-free iTunes. But like everyone else, we’re just speculating. So what’s the point of this story? Well, as we said, the rest of the tech news world has gone quiet in anticipation. While we’re not followers of the Apple religion we are trying to run a mobile computing news site here. And that’s pretty tough on Apple keynote days. So we’ll be back right after Phil Schiller takes the stage in, ooh, 40 minutes and counting.

[ Macworld Expo]