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Leopard rumor roundup

The Apple rumor mill has been circulating furiously lately with "leaks," speculation, and all manner unofficious information -- some wack and out of touch with reality, some quickly proved fake, some fun, and some even a little plausible. Unless someone gets all crazy on us and leaks Leopard long before it's due to debut at WWDC in August, all we've got now is a few of these rumors to go by. Oh, and feel free to leave some more of your favorite Leopard rumors in comments!

  • Apple will take aim at Parallels and introduce an integrated virtualization system. Seems plausible, but being that Parallels is already out, that might induce some serious anti-trust issues.

  • iChat will do VoIP and will be able to call landlines, ala Vonage, etc. Makes sense, though we'd be a little skeptical about how they'd integrate SkypeMacOut minutes into .Mac -- they'd have to come up with a new micropayment system for landline calling.

  • Apple will develop a desktop mapping application; it will be similar in form and function to Google maps. Except unlike Google maps, an Apple map app would have little point.

  • Finder to go solid metal, get tabbed interface. (Video here.)

  • Apple will take a Wine-like approach, and run Windows apps natively. Some people just won't give this one up -- the reason they entered the BAPco was because of Boot Camp, m'kay?

  • That silly iTunes BitTorrent deal: share your bandwidth with Apple so users downloading legitimate content from the iTMS get faster speeds. Your reward? Get some cash knocked off your iTMS purchases. Sounds wonderful, but it's a legal nightmare. You're going to provide value for an unaffiliated entity using your bandwidth? ISPs ain't gonna like that. And do you really think Apple's gonna convince the RIAA to take a cut in profit from iTunes for reduced prices on P2P sharing? Because Apple sure ain't gonna shave some more off that razor-thin margin of theirs, and Steve's already having a hard enough time keeping the cost at 99c per song.

  • Leopard will track your belongings via GPS tags and the maps app above. Seriously? This is just getting silly.

[Thanks to everyone who sent their Apple rumors in]