Hot on the heels of price drops at WWDC earlier this month, Apple may soon be giving the same treatment to its popular desktop line, the iMac. AppleInsider is reporting that Apple is considering a price drop similar to those seen in its portable line sometime this fall. Further, the website says Apple will be refreshing the line at the same time, despite the fact that the machines were just updated in March.

Although details about the hardware improvements are scarce, it seems feasible that an update could include one of Intel's newly rebranded Core ixx processor line in either the i7, i5, or i3. The processor upgrades, if they are i5 or i7, would bring four-core computing to Apple's consumer line offering, a reasonable speed bump under the next iteration of Apple's Mac OS X operating system, Snow Leopard.

My theory is that it seems most likely for Apple to wait until the ixx line goes mobile, possibly sometime in the winter, as the company has a long history of using mobile chipsets in the Intel iMacs. That, to me, signals a price drop right after the back-to-school rush, perhaps to clear inventory before a late fall/mid-winter update of the line. Of course, this theory will be thrown completely out the window if Apple chooses to speed bump the existing line with faster Core2Duo processors.