Edible Apple

In the past week we’ve seen reports from both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal claiming that Apple is working on a smaller iPhone model that it hopes to sell without a data plan in an effort to string in even monetarily conscious consumers into the iOS ecosystem.

This smaller iPhone is rumored to be about half the size of the current iPhone 4 and will reportedly come with an edge to edge screen. Apple, though, is notoriously efficient about the space it uses on the iPhone, so how in the world will they be able to shrink the current form factor by a factor of 2?

Well, Cult of Mac is reporting that Apple, forced to figure out a way to eliminate the need for certain space-hungry components, decided to part with some of the device’s memory which is the most expensive component of the iPhone.

By “some” of the memory, we mean ALL of the memory. The iPhone nano will have no memory for onboard storage of media, our source says. It will have only enough memory to buffer media streamed from the cloud.

“I’m talking strictly storage memory here,” said our source.

The iPhone nano will pull ALL it’s content from MobileMe. When users buy a movie or TV show on iTunes, it’s available to stream to their iPhone or iPad. The service is based on technology from LaLa.com, a streaming service that Apple bought last spring and then shut down.

“It would be a mostly cloud-based iOS,” said our source.

Cult of Mac stresses that their Apple source has a great track record, but the report certainly raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Will the device support the app store? Probably not. But wouldn’t Apple want to increase the number of folks with access to the iTunes App Store. Will it come with a camera? Hmm, where would the photos be stored? Still, even dumb phones come with basic cameras these days. Maybe the photos/videos will automatically be streamed up to the cloud and then deleted from a user’s device.