And, he says, it will make sense out of Apple’s acquisition last year of Siri, a company that developed a "virtual personal assistant" iPhone app, based on Nuance’s technology, which responds to spoken commands ("find activities for the kids in San Francisco") with recommendations. In March, that Siri’s technology "is said to be a big part of" iOS 5, less as a discrete app and more as a broader platform for application developers to exploit. Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in early June is expected by many to be where Apple unveils iOS 5. Siegler says questions still to be answered include how much of this voice recognition/process technology will be available to non-Apple software developers at the outset.

Thunderbolt I/O port: announced that iPhone 5 will have a Thunderbolt I/O port.  He had previously claimed that he’d been shown an iPhone 5 prototype earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show, with a Displayport to output video. But now he thinks the Displayport will be Thunderbolt, the high-throughput I/O interface created by Intel and Apple.

Thunderbolt offers two-way channels with each delivering 10Gbps. Apple rolled it out on the new MacBook line in February and earlier this month on . 

That might sound good to you, but you’re not Charlie Demerjian. He is not impressed. "This may sound good, but it is nothing more than a vicious attempt at lock in and price extortion," he writes.

"So, why would Apple use vastly more expensive parts that do exactly what USB3 does, cost more, is much harder to design in, limits supplier choices, and isn’t compatible with 99.9% of the devices out there?"