Macworld 2008 Predictions
It’s that time again, time for the Apple faithful to kneel at the altar of our favorite tech company to hear the first official words of Mr. Reality Distortion himself. For me personally it’s time to accidentally “forget” my wallet at home, lest I be tempted by the latest release. Speaking of the latest releases, there is a long tradition of predicting the upcoming announcements. Tomorrow we’ll know which rumors came to pass, which were duds and (perhaps) which are still to be seen down the road. This year I figured I’d join the fun and make my own predictions, so without further ado here are my predictions for Macworld ‘08:
- A new ultra-slim (but non-sub) notebook “Macbook Air”:
- 13 inch, LED screen.
- Penryn based, 2.2 or 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU.
- Solid state drive: 64 or 32Gb.
- 14 hour battery life.
- No optical drive, no Apple-branded external drive.
- Wireless only internet (802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, possibly AT&T wireless).
- 3 USB ports, 1 Firewire 400, no Firewire 800 (possibly no Firewire at all)
- Multitouch trackpad opens some new options, but nothing too radical.
- $1700
- “Most beautiful, lightest Mac ever”
- “Unbelievably thin”
- Shipping mid-late February, units on display at Macworld.
- New Macbook Pro, simple speed bump with Penryn chips. Possibly Macbook updates as well, but I doubt it.
- New displays add built-in iSight, drop prices, increased panel quality.
- Microsoft Office ‘08 demo. Many thanks to MS for making a new, universal binary version of Office.
- Statement about how X% of all (important) applications are now universal binaries, “transition to Intel now truly complete.”
- Statement about the adoption rate of Leopard, “our best OS ever, with the fastest adoption rate ever.” Making fun of Vista.
- Statement about market penetration of iTunes, iPod and iPhone. “And we’re just getting started.”
- No iPhone 3G, but new firmware (possibly demoed). Possible iPhone memory bump to match iPod Touch.
- iPhone SDK mentioned, give timeline, talk about how cool it is, but no deep in-depth demo (will wait until WWDC for that)
- Major iTunes video related announcements. Video rentals (48 hours, $3.50) with all major studios on-board. New television content, variable pricing, NBC possibly back on-board (doubt it). Video quality of all iTunes videos will be increased, previously purchased videos can be upgraded for $2.
- All iTunes tracks go DRM free with increased audio quality.
- Announcement of new music deals with Indy music studios.
- Announcement of timeline for Beatles music on iTunes.
- AppleTV update, new version is both an update of the original AppleTV and adds Airport Extreme features to make it a true digital hub. Sadly no DVR features.
- Biggest Macworld ever, “thank you”
- Sadly no Newton 2.0/Tablet announcement, yet.
- “Boom!”
- “One more thing”
So there you have it, my predictions for the keynote.
As a final note, for those of you who enjoy the annual Macworld keynote bingo game, this years edition is out.