Predictions

5 January 2007

Unless you live on the Moon – actually, I’m bet even they know, better make it ex-planet Pluto – you’ll know it’s the Macworld Expo in San Fransico next week. As is required by any blogger who occasionally writes about Apple things here’s my predictions for what we’re going to see in the keynote on Tuesday:

iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07: After a few consecutive years of iLife/iWork updates at Macworld it would be more surprising if we didn’t get new versions next week. I don’t however, think they’re going to be the most interesting updates ever; Charts/Numbers is a bit of a given for iWork, but like Pages it’ll be good but not compelling enough to make people switch from Microsoft Office.
In iLife, iWeb will almost certainly get the most attention – it needs it. More themes, less reliance on .mac, cleaner markup and urls are all desperately needed. I’m interested in seeing if they come up for a decent solution for video cataloguing/storing – both iPhoto and iTunes do it, but neither do it too well. Also, expect the whole suit to get the same look as iTunes 7
Mac OS X 10.5: I’m sure that 10.5 will be coming out sometime in the spring (March 24th maybe – 6 years to the day after 10.0) but that doesn’t mean we won’t get to see it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a whole new interface look, but it’s by no means a given. This is an incredibly important release for Apple, however, as it goes head to head with Vista so expect the “top secret” features to be quite impressive.
iTV: First things first, it’ll get a new name – they can’t use iTV for obvious reasons for any UK-based reader. iPod TV? Airport TV? Whatever they go for it could well be shipping “Today”, but that depends on what they were waiting on (obviously something otherwise they would have released it when they announced it). This something is probably 802.11N, a new wireless standard, which would also mean new Airport base stations and cards.
iPod Phone: It certainly won’t be called an iPhone, but I’m sure it exists – and I think that judging by the hype Apple’s trying to stir up we could well see it soon. I’m thinking something that is essentially an iPod Nano, with built in phone capability; I can’t figure out how they’re going to put a keypad on it without spoiling the looks but I’m sure they’ll think of something. It won’t be a smart phone, or have a huge range of features – it wouldn’t surprise me if it doesn’t have a camera – but it will have seamless Mac and iChat integration.
Something Else: When was the last time Apple did a keynote without something completely unexpected? 8 Processor Mac Pros are a possibility, as are new iSight-intergrated displays but I’m thinking something completly unexpected. Not a new iPod though, or an Apple tablet.

I could, of course, be completely wrong.

That’s all part of the fun, though.

From: Articles

5 January 2007