Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Yesterday at CES, a Motorola executive previewed a new phone that plays music from Apple’s iTunes Music store. A brief story about the preview can be found at PC Magazine. The phone mimics the iPod’s interface when browsing music, and according to the article, it can be sync’d “with a computer and the iTunes Music Store”, although in reality it would sync with iTunes and not the music store directly.

This product was announced on Your Mac Life back in July, I believe, and should be a surprise to no one.

Here’s the important thing to learn from the introduction of this device: There is no Apple-branded iPhone. There will be no Apple-branded iPhone any time in the near future.

Apple simply doesn’t believe there is anything special they can do with cell phones that isn’t already done by someone else. Apple has no value to add to the product to make it uniquely theirs, so they won’t create one. It’s not hard to understand.

Please note that I don’t believe this is the end of the rumor. Stupid rumors have an infinite life-span in the Mac world, it seems, and I anticipate hearing about an Apple-branded phone before every Macworld until my death, and 25 years after that.