Swiss precision. More than 200 tiny parts. A sapphire crystal. A price tag that’s close to twice what I paid for my first car. It sounds like something from Rolex or Omega. But it’s the Aura, a new cell phone from Motorola.

The Aura has the following features:

–the phone industry’s first round display, with 16 million colors and 300-dpi resolution;

–a stainless-steel frontpiece that takes two weeks to make;

–an “assisted opening” blade mechanism that involves more than 130 ball bearings (” an effect more like opening a luxury car door than accessing a mobile device”) and which is visible through the back of the phone;

–Stereo Bluetooth!

(Motorola’s press materials don’t mention whether it has Internet access or not; if if it has a browser that reformats pages so they’re round, I’m impressed.)

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When I first tried to compare the cost of Macs versus Windows PCs, I said that “Are Macs more expensive?” is one of computing’s eternal questions. It’s not, however, one with anything like an eternal answer. And the pricing analysis I did in that first article was rendered obsolete last Tuesday when Apple unveiled its new MacBook–which turned out to be a substantially slicker computer at a higher price point.

So it’s time to compare Apples and oranges Windows computers again. Let’s begin with a standard Mini-FAQ on the research effort that follows…

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I’m telling you, I’ve given up trying to predict what Apple will announce at its press events, such as the one that’ll happen tomorrow in San Francisco. Safe predictions (“The event is called ‘Let’s Rock,’ so it’s likely that it will involve new iPods”) are boring, boring, boring. Out-there ones (“Apple will release a touch-screen Mac tablet”) are too random. And the most interesting things that happen at Apple events are usually so unpredictable that nobody predicted them.

That doesn’t mean I’m not curious, though, or that there aren’t things I’d like to see announced. So in lieu of a list of predictions, here’s a wish list, in rough order of its chances of actually being announced tomorrow (that doesn’t count as a prediction, does it?).
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