There are now only just over two weeks left until the next Macworld Expo kicks off with the ever-popular Steve Jobs keynote address, and Apple watchers everywhere continue to wrack their imaginations trying to predict what big surprises the iCEO has in store. Last year's big surprise wasn't an announcement at all, but rather a miraculous feat of teleportation, as Jobs-- scheduled to broadcast his speech live via satellite from California-- casually sauntered on stage amid thundering applause; after that entrance, he could have read numbers from Microsoft's quarterly earnings report and still held the crowd's rapt devotion. (Well, okay, maybe he's not quite that good.) But this year, Steve's scheduled to appear live and in person, and everybody with a semi-functional optimism gland is fully expecting the introduction of the long-awaited consumer portable Mac. So what will the surprise be?

On the strength of a single unsubstantiated rumor, we at AtAT have been banking on some kind of big "non-Mac move." (Hey, if your speculation stems from actual facts rather than pure, unadulterated rumor, you're missing half the fun.) See, the nice thing about focusing on a "non-Mac" announcement is that it opens the doors to all sorts of fun possibilities. Jobs might introduce a permanent CEO, or finally take the job himself. Some kind of big partnership or merger might emerge between Apple and Oracle, or Palm, or-- dare we say it?-- Disney. Apple might reveal plans to expand into hitherto uncharted consumer territory by releasing lines of furniture, carpeting, wallpaper, drapes, and breakfast cereal specially designed to complement the fruit-flavored translucent plastics of the iMac and the Power Mac G3. It could be just about anything. If you limit yourself to a Mac-centric surprise, what is there? Sure, we'd welcome a next-generation iMac as much as anyone, but we all know that's coming at some point-- for now, we'd rather chew on some less pedestrian concepts instead.

That's why the increasing evidence of an Apple Internet service is so intriguing. The very idea of Apple jumping back into the ISP game after the spectacular collapse of eWorld a few years back was once limited strictly to rumors sites and nutcases like us, but now even legitimate news sources like MacInTouch are posting tips about such a venture. According to one of their readers, Apple is "about to close a big deal" with Portal, a company that "develops, markets and supports real-time, scalable customer management and billing software... for providers of Internet-based services." Verrrrry interesting, no? And while we're hard-pressed to think of what Apple can offer in terms of Internet service that the gazillion other ISPs out there could not, we have enough faith in the "new" Apple that we strongly doubt they'd leap into the fray without a distinct differentiating factor up their collective sleeve. Too bad Internet service can't come in translucent fruit flavors...