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10 completely ridiculous iPhone rumors I just made up

In my last article on the NSA and Vlad Putin, I said I couldn't make this stuff up. That was then, this is now. I'm making all of this stuff up. So, in this case, just once, apparently you can make this stuff up.
Written by David Gewirtz, Senior Contributing Editor

It's that time of the year again. The time when all the fanboys consider taking their first shower of the fall season to celebrate the announcement of Apple's latest bit of bling. It's iPhone time again, and everyone is terribly excited.

No. wait. That was 2010. This is 2013, and as James Kendrick so aptly put it, this year's iPhone is a lost surprise. I think it's even worse than that. I think we're all bored.

Even so, we in the press and those chirpy little bloggers out there in the Apple blogosphere can't seem to stop wallowing in the rumors. Ooh, there will be cheaper phones. Oh, there will be a fingerprint reader. Ah, there will be a golden shell.

Yawn.

In an effort to spice up these proceedings just a little bit, and because even the rumors are boring, I've decided to step in and make up some of my own rumors. Now, to be fair, some of my rumors are also boring — but at least they are original.

And here they are, without further ado, I present to you 10 completely ridiculous iPhone rumors I just made up (in Letterman backwards order, as if #1 was any more important or funny than #10):

Rumor #10: the new iPhone can levitate small animals. As it turns out, if you place a small animal (nothing bigger than a kitten, although a goldfish would also do), and you press the Home button three times while telling Siri, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home," the new iPhone will float the pet approximately 5/72 of an inch above the screen. If it weren't science, it would be magic.

Rumor #9: the new iPhone contains a pizza-making 3D printer. ZDNet covered NASA's attempts to 3D print a pizza a few months ago, but now it's real.

The new iPhone will come with an app that will actually generate a 3D printed pizza from excess Retina display pixels. The only downside of this feature is each pizza apparently comes with 30 percent of the slices removed. This is how Apple intends to feed its engineers working on the iPhone 7.

Rumor #8: the new iPhone shoots poison darts. This one is pure fanboy-service. The new high-end iPhone smart case with real fake diamonds also comes with a slot that will hold one poison dart.

If you hold the smart case and fling the iPhone around your head like a slingshot, you can shoot one poison dart at a time at Android lovers and those who say Windows Phone will dominate. Look at it this way: you're helping natural selection. The only problem is, like with the Wiimote, you have to remember to hang onto your phone as you wind up your arm.

Rumor #7: the new iPhone will support custom phone colors. The Moto X has it and now the iPhone will, too. No longer will you be restricted to the colors Apple thinks are hip.

If you want your iPhone to look like drying blood ala Dexter, you can now have it. If you want your iPhone to be Dukes of Hazzard (or Halloween) orange and black, you can have it. If you want to celebrate this great nation and show your support for the NSA, you can order your phone in read, white, and blue. It's all possible now, baby.

Rumor #6: the new iPhone camera has a "remove the ugly" feature. There once was a time when the old Sony cameras had a "nightshot" feature that was reputed to allow X-ray vision. That was child's play.

X-ray vision isn't in line with Apple's vision of proper behavior. But making sure you look good certainly is. The new iPhone comes with a crowd-sourced, big-data enabled, real-time analytics driven, sentiment analysis filtering system. All pictures taken by all iPhone users will get a star rating that indicate the level of happiness with a given picture.

As new pictures are taken, they are compared with the happy pictures in the cloud, and those pictures that score a low happiness rating based on the overall planet's rating preferences — weighted with region preferences, of course — will be adjusted to remove the ugly.

Now, if you take a picture of an ugly house, you'll get a picture of the house, but all the ugly will be removed. If you take a picture of an ugly person, those individual features all Apple users consider acceptable will be retained, while the ugly features will be replaced by more acceptable representations.

What makes this feature particularly exciting is that nobody will be able to turn it off. Eventually, Apple claims, there will no longer be any ugly pictures —at least in Apple's world.

Rumor #5: the new iPhone has incredible speakers that are perfectly directional. Are you tired of using earphones? Are you tired of listening to your music in bed and having to wear a wire connected to your head so your spouse doesn't ever have to hear Justin Bieber or Miley Cyrus at 3am?

Well, now you can toss away those earphones and listen to your music or programs without bothering anyone else. Apple has announced its new iHearYa technology, which turns air into a speaker. It projects sound to a specific point in front of you, and you and only you can hear it.

This is also Apple's foothold into the living room, because Apple can now project what's on the new iPhone onto the Apple TV and only you can hear what's playing. Now, you can watch just as many Law & Order episodes as you wish and your kids will never have to hear those over-used 90s-sound boom-boom opening notes that seem to make so many old folks go into trance.

Rumor #4: the new iPhone creates its own cone of silence. Continuing with Apple's amazing sound-warping technology, the new iPhone can create your own personal cone of silence. Let's say you're at Starbucks and yelling loudly into your phone. Now your neighbors don't have to hear it.

The new iPhone uses triple-undulating-wave-canceling-meta-snazzy-reflective-audio-contortion-slick technology that absorbs all sound inside the cone. Even better, if two or more people are at a Starbucks table, each with a new iPhone, the cone of silence can either keep them out, or expand to bring them into a private soundscape.

Of course, if there's an Android user at the table, that person will be shut out of all conversation automatically. This makes it easier to ignore Android users, without having to be purposely rude.

Rumor #3: the new iPhone IS a smartwatch. With all this fuss about wearable technology, it's easy to lose track of the fact that the iPhone is the ultimate fashion accessory. While rumors exist of an iPod nano-mini-ish thing coming out that can be worn on the wrist, Apple is pulling out all the stops and turning the new iPhone into a smart watch.

After all, the iPhone is smaller than those monstrous Android phones and if people are going to wear anything on their wrist, it might as well be an iPhone, right? Apple is accomplishing this by making the entire iPhone out of flexible display technology, so the iPhone itself becomes a slap-band that you can flap onto your wrist.

A new API has been developed for iOS 7 that allows developers to shrink down their screens while the phone is in wrist-slap mode, and then zoom them back up instantly once the phone has been de-slapped and is used in hand. You can see why the Apple fans are so excited.

Rumor #2: the iPhone runs Android apps (and is based on Android). Few people today realize that Apple's OS X is really based on a form of the UNIX operating system, a kissing cousin to Linux and even Android. iOS versions up through iOS 6 were based on the same core code as OS X.

But with iOS 7, Apple decided to shortcut all that development time and hassle and merely install Jelly Bean on the new iPhone. To enable all the new, sexy iOS 7 features, Apple bought resale rights to a bunch of Android widgets and a launcher replacement app (rumors are that Apple started with the free Go Launcher, but eventually licensed the Nova Launcher product, and customized a set of widgets).

Apple will still sell all its apps through the Apple App Store and says it won't support side-loading of Apps from Google Play or Amazon. According to Apple VP of App Applications and Allowable Attitudes Skippy Ballmer (no relation), "We figured it would cut years off the development cycle and we could just hire the kid at my son's high school who's always customizing everyone's phones in return for their mom's baked goods."

Rumor #1: the new iPhone will be called the WiiUPhone. Although Apple initially missed the whole social network thing, and its music social network Ping was completely ignored by everyone except Baxter McGillicuddy of Wakefield, New Hampshire, the folks at Apple aren't stupid. They know that social, collaboration, and sharing are the big things these days.

We're no longer the "me" generation, we're the "we" generation. In addition, Apple noticed that its App sales were dominated — DOMINATED(!)— by game sales, which (quite incidentally) was something that the executives at Nintendo also noticed. Since sales of the new Nintendo WiiU had suddenly and predictably fallen into the toilet, Apple (it is rumored) is picking up Nintendo's intellectual property and gaming licenses for a song (which, apparently, they then played on Ping).

Realizing that the iPhone brand had run its course, and loving the idea of products named Wii (after groups of us, not, you know, the bodily function), the new iPhone will be named the WiiUPhone and come with a copy of Super-Duper-Mario Brothers Extended Family Second Cousins Edition absolutely free. Players will be able to download Mario and other characters they've heard of in game, for a mere $9.99 per character.

Wrap-up: Well, that's the list. None of this is true or even believable, but that's how the rumor game is just before an Apple launch. Go tell everyone about what you've just read. It's not true. It's silly. It's even ridiculous. But when has that stopped anyone before?

By the way, I'm doing more updates on Twitter and Facebook than ever before. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at @DavidGewirtz and on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz.

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