The Consolidation Quarter

After starting the year with a flourish of announcements (MacBook Air, Time Capsule, rentals on the iTunes Store) and excellent results for the last quarter of fiscal announced at the end of January, it seems Apple has decided to devote the current quarter for the consolidation of its products rather than departing from their current builds.
Indeed, if we look closely, all the physical changes have been relatively minor:
-- GB iPhone 16
-- Touch 32 GB iPod
-- 2 GB iPod Shuffle
-- MacBook Pro Penryn
-- MacBook Penryn
It should be noted that over the last two MacBook interations, Apple has done the minimum in R & D by not touching either's motherboard design, content to replace the processors, memory and hard drive.
The same can be said for all these new products, actually: Apple merely amended its component list for a few items. From an economic point of view, it helps to boost sales at a lower cost, even among more powerful successors now priced the same as previous models.
After a long period of forced progression, one can get the impression that Apple is on a break, and that is certainly the case. They can take the time to consolidate their gains thanks to the strong growth of their sales, while preparing the second wave of innovations promised by Steve Jobs. It would not be surprising that in the coming weeks the iMac and even the Mac mini also are entitled to a face-lift.
For major design innovations and developments, they will certainly wait until the Intel Centrino 2 in early summer. At that time (before the end of the summer on academic orders), we believe, the design of MacBook and MacBook Pro may evolve as well.