Forget next month. It’s more fun thinking about what digital toys Apple might be making in five years. Of course, Mr. Jobs’s penchant for secrecy means such predictions are often little more than daydreaming. Just do an Internet search for “Apple” and “mockup” to see photos of products invented by Apple fans.

Forrester Research (FORR) is the latest to look into the crystal ball in a new report that imagines the Apple products of 2013. But rather than predict Apple jet packs or other outlandish new directions, the research firm uses the company’s recent history as a guide to forecasting.

Forrester’s conclusion: While much of Apple’s great successes have been mobile products such as the iPod and the iPhone, the company will seek to colonize rooms throughout the home.

Among the new products Forrester predicts Apple will create are wall-mountable digital picture frames with small high-definition screens and speakers that wirelessly play media, including photos, videos and music, stored on a computer elsewhere in the home. Such products already exist, but Apple could put its own twist on them — for example, by adding its design panache and a touch-sensitive screen that lets viewers flip from image to image with a finger swipe, a la the iPhone.

For the bedroom, Forrester envisions an Apple “clock radio” that pipes in music and other media across a home network. Possible, too, is an “AppleSound” universal remote control, also with a touch-sensitive screen, that lets users browse their music collections and change the songs playing through their stereo as they stroll around the house. This latter technology is already available in primitive form through an application called Signal (www.alloysoft.com) that turns the iPod touch and the iPhone into remote controls for Apple’s iTunes program.

Forrester also thinks Apple could extend into the home the technical assistance currently offered by “Genius Bar” personnel in Apple retail stores. Apple in-home installation services will become especially important as its array of products for the home grows. “The complexity level here can be quite daunting if you have five or six of these different devices,” says J.P. Gownder, one of the Forrester analysts who wrote the report.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the company’s product plans.

Apple prognosticating is such a popular pastime, in part, because Mr. Jobs has proved so adept at becoming a power broker in markets a Silicon Valley computer company — once known as Apple Computer — has no right to dominate. The iPod remains the top MP3 player, with more than 70% of the market, and Apple is now the top retailer of music in the nation, ahead of Wal-Mart (WMT) Stores. Less than a year after entering the cellphone business with the iPhone, Apple became the second-largest provider of smart phones in the U.S.

That said, the company had an underwhelming foray into the living room with a television set-top device called Apple TV that plays music, photos and movies downloaded from the Internet and PCs on a home network. In an interview earlier this year after dropping the price on the product by $70 to $229, Mr. Jobs said he was disappointed in its sales.

Despite the hiccups, veteran observers of Apple say Mr. Jobs’s intent is clear. “I see everything Steve is doing as positioning himself to take over completely the living room,” says John Seely Brown, a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California and the former director of Xerox’s PARC, the Palo Alto, Calif., research center that inspired some of the innovations of the original Macintosh.

One long-running prediction, proved wrong again and again: that Apple might make a television set. Forrester throws cold water on the idea. Yet some still believe that Apple will one day get into the business as conventional TV makers start to integrate into their sets the ability to surf the Web. Apple already designs computer displays that are as large as some HDTVs.

Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple with Mr. Jobs, says it would make “a lot of sense” for Apple to do a television set that can also access media stored on the Internet and local PCs. “I only started thinking that way recently,” Mr. Wozniak says. “Apple is obviously in the world of delivering display devices already.”

Mr. Brown thinks Apple could simplify the traditional functions on TV sets, like the bewildering electronic programming guides that list the hundreds of channels available to viewers. “Most people find operating high-quality TV systems incredibly awkward,” he says. “They’re as bad as our computer systems.”

• Send comments to Nick.Wingfield@wsj.com. Walter S. Mossberg will return on June 5.

But for some folks, getting the most out of these players takes too much work or too much money. Converting CDs to music files takes time, as does selecting and downloading tracks from online music services, and synchronizing players with PCs. Creating great playlists also takes time and effort. Some people prefer the old radio model, where songs are programmed by somebody else and you just listen.

Plus, whether you download songs for 99 cents apiece, use a subscription download service for $15 a month, or sign up for satellite radio at $13 a month, the costs to keep your portable player filled legally can add up quickly.

So a new kind of portable player, one for more passive and budget-minded users, is slated to arrive late next month. It’s called the Slacker Personal Radio, and its name is meant to refer to people of any age who just want to sit back and listen instead of actively managing their music.

The new Slacker players will come in three models, ranging from $200 to $300, depending on capacity. But the music they play will be absolutely free, contained in preprogrammed Internet radio stations instead of individually selected songs and albums. The stations will be automatically refreshed with new tunes via a wireless connection built right into the device. You’ll have to be near a hot spot for these updates. But you won’t need a hot spot just to hear your music, because the songs are cached on the device. And you’ll never have to plug it into a computer.

The player is tied to Slacker’s free Internet radio service, slacker.com, which is already up and running, and allows you to listen to music via any standard Windows or Mac Web browser. Using the service, you can personalize your player by selecting from over 100 canned stations or by creating stations based around any of 10,000 artists. These stations will be beamed to your player wirelessly. You can even choose which stations are loaded onto your player before the company ships it to you.

The company, a San Diego-based start-up of the same name, hopes to make money eventually via advertising on the player, and by selling an optional paid premium plan that offers some additional features.

I’ve been testing a prototype of the chunky, black plastic Slacker player, which is dominated by a four-inch color screen. It has two redundant navigation systems: a touch-sensitive strip at the side of the screen and a wheel on one edge. It provides a rich listening experience, including album art and other photos, artist bios and album reviews. The sound is good, and the Wi-Fi wireless connection worked in both my home and office.

The two prototype Slacker units I tried, however, were hobbled by bugs and glitches that the company must expunge by the release date, which was originally slated to be this month. For instance, the players sometimes failed to wake up after going to sleep, requiring a reboot. The touch strip was unreliable. One player failed several times to connect to my account. Battery life is well below Slacker’s goal of 12 hours between charges. The company says it is aware of these problems, and pledges all will be fixed.

Slacker isn’t the only portable player to offer programmed Internet stations. The Rhapsody service offers similar, customizable Internet-based stations on a couple of players. And both the Sirius and XM satellite-radio networks offer portable players for listening to their stations, although the stations can’t be customized. But all of these players require monthly subscription payments, while Slacker’s stations are free.

The Slacker Radio

Because Slacker is based on Internet radio, it has some limitations imposed by the rules governing that format. For example, you can’t specify a particular song to play, or skip back to repeat a song. And you can skip ahead only six times per station per hour. Even if you create a station around a particular artist, the station will mainly be filled with artists the service considers similar. Songs by the artist you selected will be played only four times every three hours.

The player has a “heart button” for designating a song for frequent play and a “ban” button to eliminate the songs you hate.

If you’re willing to pay, or put in more effort, you can get additional capabilities. For example, Slacker players can hold and play some of your own songs, in addition to programmed stations, if you download a free Windows software program. And, if you sign up for the premium option at $7.50 a month, you get unlimited song-skipping, no ads, and the ability to save favorite songs on the device and play them as often as you like.

But the basic idea of Slacker is to make portable listening free of effort and of service charges. If the company can wring the bugs out of its new player and if its ads aren’t too annoying, that formula may appeal to some busy music lovers.

Email me at mossberg@wsj.com. Find all my columns and videos online free at the new All Things Digital Web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

But there’s a substantial minority of folks who have neither the time, knowledge, nor inclination to do all this downloading and ripping. They don’t want to fool around with any PC software just to hear music. They could just sign up for a subscription service like Rhapsody, which will stream songs to you without requiring any downloading or ripping. But that also has meant using a PC.

The Sonos controller, accessing the Rhapsody music service

Until now. Starting today, there’s a way to get access to Rhapsody’s 2.5 million digital tunes, in any room in your house, straight from the Internet — without even turning on your computer.

This new system is a time/money tradeoff. It saves you time (and what some folks consider a big hassle) in exchange for money: $999 for the basic hardware, plus $10 a month for the music service.

If you’re still reading after digesting those prices, let me add that I’ve been testing this system, which pairs up Rhapsody with the elegant Sonos whole-house music system, and it works very well. It is simple, fast and rewarding.

Both Sonos and Rhapsody were originally designed to work with PCs. Sonos is the most polished consumer hardware system on the market for taking the music that resides on a computer and streaming it to multiple other rooms of your home. It consists of a series of small music-playback boxes that connect to each other over their own wireless network. It normally relies on software you install on the computer. The system is controlled by a gorgeous hand-held remote with an iPod-like wheel and a large, bright color screen that show menus and song information.

Rhapsody, too, is typically dependent on a PC. Users pay a monthly fee to either “stream” music from its collection, or to download it for use on the computer or on a portable device. This is all done using Rhapsody’s software, or a Web browser.

But, with the new Sonos/Rhapsody system, no PC is necessary. You just connect the Sonos hardware to your Internet service, and to either powered speakers or an audio system. Then, simply click on the Rhapsody choice in the menu on the Sonos controller and you can listen to any of Rhapsody’s 2.5 million tracks.

Out of the box, the new Sonos system gives you a 30-day free trial to Rhapsody, without even requiring that you enter a credit card. After that, you must pay $10 a month.

There are other media-streaming devices that can bring Rhapsody to parts of a home far from the computer, and most cost less than Sonos. But all of them, even an earlier implementation using Sonos, require a PC.

Setup of Sonos with Rhapsody was simple. For your $999, you get two small Sonos ZP80 players and one controller. You plug one of the players into your home Internet router so it can fetch the music over the Internet from Rhapsody. The second unit can then be placed in a distant room, with speakers or an audio system, where you wish to hear the music. The two units are linked by their own wireless network, which sets itself up in a few minutes with the press of a couple of buttons.

You can even do this with a single Sonos box connected to the router or to an Ethernet cable running through your walls, if you have one. That would save you some money; a single ZP80 is $349 and the controller is $399, for a total of around $750.

Once you are set up, you just click on “Rhapsody Trial” on the Sonos controller, and you can then select songs via genre, artist and other criteria. Again, there are no files to download. Nothing gets stored on your computer or on the Sonos hardware. The music is just streamed into your home over the Internet.

There are two basic Rhapsody modes. One, called Rhapsody Guide, lets you find and play music, and allows you to “save” the songs or albums to your Rhapsody library. This is a list of songs that the system will fetch from the Rhapsody servers when you want to hear them again. The other, called Rhapsody Radio, consists of over 100 “radio stations” — preprogrammed playlists — based on genres, eras and other criteria. You can also create your own stations.

Although my wife and I aren’t great candidates for this product, because we use iPods and iTunes and have a computer hooked up to our entertainment system, we both got a kick out of the Sonos/Rhapsody package. I found myself scrolling through old rock ‘n’ roll on the treadmill, and she enjoyed a radio station of Broadway show tunes.

There are some drawbacks. Because of complex music-industry policies, a small percentage of songs can’t be streamed, yet they still show up in Rhapsody’s menus, which leads to frustration. And Sonos hasn’t been able to implement a search feature yet, which leaves you doing a lot of scrolling through menus.

But, overall, this is a very good digital-music alternative for people with a roomy budget and a yen for simplicity.

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com