All Eyes on Apple

All Eyes on Apple
Steve Jobs, chief executive of Apple Computer, takes to the stage on Tuesday at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco, a highly anticipated appearance that some observers believe could mark a significant strategic shift for the high-end niche personal computer maker.

That is because the rumor-mill has been rife with speculation over the past few weeks that Apple will unveil a so-called "headless Mac", a bare-bones entry-level PC without a monitor aimed at mass-market consumers who have long been put off by the company's high prices.

If true, the "headless Mac" is likely to be one of several new products announced during the week-long Expo, which coincides with Apple's fiscal first-quarter earnings report on Wednesday.

Mr. Jobs is also expected to unveil a cheaper, lower-capacity version of Apple's wildly popular iPod digital music player, one which stores music files on flash memory chips instead of the mini hard disk drives that the current iPods use.

New products like these would signal an important shift in strategy for Apple, which has long prided itself on designing premium PC products. Some analysts say these mass market offerings would enable Apple to capitalize on the success of the iPod. Analysts now expect Apple to report that it sold as many as 5m iPods in the latest quarter, nearly as many as it had s