This Week's Apple Rumors, Ranked From Dumbest to Most Plausible

Each week, there are dozens of Apple rumors, reports, and patent filings that hint at what's coming out of Cupertino next. Some are legit, but most are totally bogus. While the rumor mill has slowed down for the holidays, Apple's intellectual property filings continue to hint at some curious possibilities. As always, we've parsed the week's rumors, ranking them in order from 'utterly ridiculous' to 'duh, of course.' First up...

ASK AGAIN LATER: Apple Working On Display Panel That Can Track Touch and Hover Gestures On Tuesday Apple was granted a patent titled ' Touch and hover signal drift compensation,' which covers a type of touchscreen that would be able to accurately track individual fingers hovering over the screen and touch gestures. This would let you open an app, for example, without even touching the display. A majority of the patent focuses on how to correct for signal drift, a phenomenon that can affect capacitive touch sensors when ambient temperature, humidity, and pressure change. Apple's solution would basically recalibrate periodically to adjust for that.

ASK AGAIN LATER: Apple Getting Into 3-D Circuit Printing Inkjet printers are normally used to drop ink or conductive ink onto 2D surfaces, but Apple is proposing a way to do it on 3-D surfaces. The company's (very technical) patent specifically deals with dispensing conductive ink, which can be used to print circuits. The patent itself doesn't discuss any sort of consumer applications, but I'd imagine such technology could be used to help make devices even thinner by utilizing space more efficiently than current types of circuit boards. It could also be a possible way to make manufacturing more cost-efficient.

ASK AGAIN LATER: Siri Could Let You Search Photos By Voice Another patent application out of Cupertino suggests that Siri may be able to search your photos in the future. 'Voice-Based Image Tagging and Searching' describes how you could tag photos with strings of natural language text, and these tags could be used to organize and search through your photos. Apple already began sorting photos into collections by date and location in iOS 7, but this would make going through all that mess simpler. You could ask Siri to 'show me photos of me in New York,' and photos you've tagged as 'me in New York' would show up. Sounds like a plausible future feature of Siri, but we'll have to see if it pans out - Apple patents lots of ideas, but many of them never actually come to fruition.

SIGNS POINT TO YES: Apple Working on 12.9-Inch iPad For years the pint-sized iPad mini was Apple's rumor du jour. Now that it actually exists, it looks like the 12.9-inch iPad will be the next Apple tablet size. The latest from the frequently accurate Digitimes says that Apple is working on a 12.9-inch iPad that will aimed at the education space and debut in October. A fall launch for the next iPad - whatever size - seems reasonable, and Apple has devoted significant resources to promoting its tablets in the education and enterprise areas (although a larger, more expensive iPad sounds like a tough swallow for most school districts). The same Digitimes report also suggested the next iPhone will debut in May, but that sounds pretty bogus.