Apple has its annual event today, the event which turns every fruit fan on the Internet into a tech prognosticator (we used to get two of them before the company pulled out of MacWorld, so the folks have a lot of built up predictions to blow).

It would seem we're not in for new hardware so the pundits are all atwitter about iOS 5, Lion (the desktop OS), and all of the cloud juice that will render them into thin caches of data stored under the Smoky mountains in Apple's new state-of-the-art datacenter.

I'm going to make a short argument for something more compelling: Apple using it formidable footprint at the center of the Internet's dark matter, a.k.a, all of the Macs and Time Machines that sit at the end of broadband connections with terabytes of storage and wasted processor cycles. If they could leverage these to create higher fidelity cloud services (where you don't have to make the design compromises that are required to scale to hundreds of millions of users), it'd be a pretty interesting and potentially disruptive product direction.

There have been rumors that the next generation of Time Machine will be leveraged to do this and in some ways this makes sense; a dedicated piece of hardware is more likely to be always on. Unfortunately though, Time Machine has proven unreliable in the past and would require significant hardware and software upgrades to pick up some server class reliability.

If not Apple, someone should remember the lesson of Napster and begin to find ways to leverage all of this dark matter.