Musings from The Software Underground

It's that time of year again, and it's time for my own personal predictions of what we'll see at Macworld. Note that these things are only based on my idle speculation, not on any insider info.

• Leopard Fully Unveiled - Expect Jobs to take the wraps off of Leopard, fully this time. WWDC allowed access to enough of Leopard to let us get familiar with the underlying technology, but expect the curtain to be pulled back at Macworld. What do I expect? A newer, smoother look to OS X. Think about it: Aqua is from the days when Apple was producing hardware that was colorful and translucent, just like Aqua is. None of this is true any more, so expect Leopard to more closely resemble what we see now: smooth, sleek, clean lines with no more brushed metal, and no more bubbly buttons. Think the unified look but system-wide. We'll get a ship date, but it will be later rather than sooner.


• Spotlight: Redux - This HAS to be a candidate for a redesign. What we have now is awful, it's by far one of the most poorly designed pieces of the OS and always feels so out of place with the rest of things. I curse it every time I try and use it. It's such a great idea, but the main UI is so poorly implemented I have a feeling it goes unused half of the time.


• Updated iWork and iLife - These are a given, aren't they? I'd expect iWork to finally include the much rumored spreadsheet. iLife will more than likely include incremental updates and a much improved iWeb.


• iTunes Store Gets a Quality Bump - I think we might see Apple increase the video quality, again, joined by a long overdue increase in the music download quality. I buy a lot from the store, and I'd love to have all of it lossless.


• iTV - Or what will more likely be called something like Mac Media Center as iTV is not going to be the name. We already know that it will allow you link your Mac and your home entertainment center. The big question is "so what?" Just that alone isn't totally compelling. Let me record content and dock my iPod and now we're talking. I think the rumors of it having an internal disk are true, so the next logical step is recording, right? Maybe. That disk could also just be used for caching as well. I have high hopes for this, but fear it will just really be an Airport Express that supports video and disk caching.


• Updated iPods - Expect updated iPods to be announced, along with record sales over Christmas. Will these new iPods have wide screens? Hard to say, maybe the new iPods will really just really be the product in my next prediction:


• The iPod Phone - Yeah, I think this will be Steve's "One more thing." It's just been too long coming, and this would be a BIG thing to debut. Let's face it, phones suck. The interfaces are terrible, and we all know it. They are currently just one big mish-mash of features all thrown in there with no cohesive plan (at least by appearances anyway). I'd personally love to see a brushed metal Nano-like phone that opened up the OS to developers, the same way Apple has opened up the iPod for games development. I still think that dual batteries would be a must for reliable usage. It's quite possible that any new iPods shown will really be the iPod phones.

So there you have them, my own predictions. I don't think we'll see a new ultra-thin laptop (though I'd personally kill for one). I don't think Jobs will use Macworld to announce new Cinema displays with built-in iSights, he can do that any time he wants. I also don't think we'll see new Pro hardware, that's usually shown at WWDC.

Labels: Musings