14 DAY TRIAL // It's no rumor, Apple themselves have announced that they will not have a booth at The NAB Show this year, with speculation increasing after Avid Technology (Apple's main competitor at the NAB Show) dropped out late last year, according to TVTechnology.com. An Apple spokesman confirmed that the Cupertino folks are cutting down on overall trade show participation.
"Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year," said Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple. "Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways."
The company behind the world's thinnest notebook declined to say exactly how much Apple time the show will offer, or whether it plans to make a return. A spokesman for NAB also said that the organization is discussing partnerships with the company at the show: "We're talking about some on-site business opportunities with Apple," Dennis Wharton said.
In other news, tuaw.com claims that the company that does television for Apple's live events and Macworld has let the website in on a little secret. Reportedly, the company in question is "hiring for an unannounced Apple event at the end of February," and while TUAW insists "this is an unconfirmed rumor," yet trusts its source, "job listings are not available on the video company's website." Also, Apple has not confirmed any events whatsoever for February.
You don't need to be rocket scientist to realize that these two pieces of news may very well be connected to one another, simply because Apple is pulling its NAB booth and throwing resources in a (probably) exclusive Apple event at the end of February.
The news is even more exciting given that Apple has accomplished pretty much all of its plans with the AppleTV, iPhone, MacBook Air, Leopard and Safari updates and so on. If it proves to be true, then a huge surprise coming out of the Cupertino labs is definitely in order.