Apple's Macworld Announcements--Our Take
Okay, here is the "low hanging fruit:"
iLife '07 and iWork '07. These are no brainers since Apple has updated these two application suites the past couple of years. In addition, it has been reported that Amazon.com inadvertently posted box shots. The real intrigue is what will Apple add, if anything, to each suite. Things that we think are high on the list of possibilities are a home media application for iLife '07 and a spreadsheet/charting application for iWork '07. These are natural evolutionary additions and, perhaps, just enough to entice people to buy the 2007 upgrades.
Public Demo of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard." Steve Jobs demoed a very early version of the next Mac OS X last summer at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2006, Apple has made Leopard updates available to developers and Apple has set up a Leopard-specific Web page. Since there has been no real public demo of Leopard and its due out this spring, we think it is virtually certain that Steve Jobs will demo Leopard and all of its major features. At WWDC 2006, Jobs claimed that he was saving some of Leopard's features for later to prevent them from being copied ostensibly by Microsoft in its Windows Vista. With Vista already released to enterprise customers and ready to be released to the rest of the world in a few weeks, probably nothing could be copied from Leopard that Microsoft doesn't already know about.
iTV by its final name. Apple is very secretive about future products so it was very unusual last September when Steve Jobs gave the world a sneak peek at Apple's future home media product code-named iTV at a special event. The iTV looked like a half-height Mac mini, connects to a flat panel TV and accepts video streamed by Wi-Fi from a Mac. Jobs said it will sell for $299 and be available in the first quarter of 2007. Given all this, we think it is highly likely that Steve Jobs will reveal the product's final name and demo it. The one thing that we can think of that could hold it back is if Apple believes that the new super high speed Wi-Fi protocol 802.11n is not ready for prime time. But Apple is known for pushing back frontiers and the new MacBook Pros, at least, already have 802.11n capability built in so....
Moving to the next level of speculation, here the items that we think have a some chance of seeing daylight:
Wi-Fi 802.11n in all new Macs and AirPort Base Stations. It makes sense to us that all new Macs should be able to use "iTV" if it is announced as a final product. If so, then Apple may use the opportunity to further speed/feature-bump the consumer Mac lines (Mac mini, iMac and MacBook).
Quad-core Mac Pros. We think Apple wants to keep its Intel-based pro desktop computers on the cutting edge of Intel's CPUs. Since Intel is beginning to produce the new quad-core CPUs, Apple could announce new quad-core Mac Pros with delivery beginning in a month or so. There could even be a high-end dual quad-core Mac Pro, i.e. one with two quad-core chips or eight processors. As a corollary, we hope that Leopard will be able to scale to any number of processors. If Apple does this, then we would expect a quad-core MacBook Pro in early summer with a faster Core 2 Duo in between.
New Monitors/Sight/Curvability. Samsung (Apple's major LCD partner) is announcing commercial LCD TV screens up to 70" at CES this week, 30" LCD monitors have been introduced by several other computer vendors and Apple has dropped the iSight camera. These events lead us to believe that Apple will likely introduce a new line of monitors. The new monitors will likely sport the same small built-in iSight cameras that are included currently with all Mac portables and iMacs. It's also possible that Apple will instead introduce a new tiny external iSight to keep its monitors free of cameras that are forbidden in many computing environments. With regard to size, our bet is on a new larger professional monitor with the 30", 23" (or 24" given competitors offerings) and 20" moving downscale rather than re-introducing a smaller 17" display as some have speculated. With thinner, cheaper and LED-backlit LCD panels, the new larger (mostly wider) monitor will be adjustable to permit curving for truer 3D visualization. Okay, the curvability feature is a bit of a high flyer and it may need a special and expensive graphics card but wouldn't it be really cool for science and gaming and even helpful for general use with a very large monitor?
iPhone (or iChat Mobile?). We'll go along with the pack and agree that it's time for Apple's "iPhone" to come out. There is so much buzz about it, including from flash memory manufacturers. However, if it does, we believe that it won't be just a cool cell phone that also plays music because that has already been done (well, maybe not the "cool" part) and it's already nearly a commodity product. Apple's cell phone product will likely take a revolutionary step or in some way define a new space for cell phones. Even adding complex text messaging or emailing like a Blackberry may not cut it. Could the revolutionary step be to add two-way video via Wi-Fi or EVDO like iChat or the long-rumored touchscreen or both?
That's it from us. We'd love to see a Mac ultra-portable using a flash memory hard drive like this new Samsung product but we don't believe that Apple thinks it's a financially sound product. Tomorrow, we'll know for sure. [Bill Fox & Dana Baggett]
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