Something in the Air?
Macworld Predictions
In response to, and mostly expanding on, the TUAW staff’s predictions, here are my predictions for next week’s Steve-note!
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iPhone updates
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First, Steve will give a status report on how the current phone is selling and will start off the iPhone news with a capacity bump to 16GB (75-80% chance). This phone will be shipping within a month and will cost $400. The current 8GB version will be available for $300. The price drop will drive sales and help Apple meet it’s goal of 10 million phones sold by the end of the year (50% chance).
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The 3G iPhone will be announced and will include 3G capability. This has a 100% chance of happening because the device will need to be certified by the FCC and Apple doesn’t want the cat let out of the bag except by them. It will probably be available mid-year. This gives them half a year to sell them to all the holdouts that were screaming for 3G support. It will be available in 16GB capacity for $500.
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Steve will demo the next version of iTunes (7.6?), which will be necessary for the following:
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Video Rentals – With all the clues found in the current version, this will hit eventually (90% chance).
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iPhone Application/Game support – Steve won’t spend a lot of time on the SDK since this is the consumer event, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few games are available immediately (50% chance).
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Office 2008 – This is almost a given. I expect a short demo of Office 2008 since it just went Gold and is available for pre-order (I think). I’ll give it an 80% chance.
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HD/Blu-ray – I’m not sure of anything here. I doubt the infrastructure is really in place for HD downloads and since they just updated the Mac Pros and no Blu-ray drives were present, I doubt we’ll see a Blu-ray drive in any of the consumer offerings.
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That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see modest refreshes to the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and/or iMac product lines (60% chance).
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Miscellaneous predictions
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Airport Express 2.0 with 802.11N support (50% chance).
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New displays – The prices came down on the lower-end models so I would expect new versions to come out within three months. These displays will most likely look like the iMac and support iSight cameras and the Apple Remote.
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Headless mac (mini-tower/Mac Mini replacement) – I doubt we’ll see much here. If we do, I would expect Apple to combine it with the Apple TV to give it the ability to play DVDs (or possibly Blu-ray discs?). I don’t believe that it will have DVR capability though.
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Subnotebook/Newton-esque device – What is the business need? How many people actually are clamoring for something like this. While I’ll admit there are the very vocal few, I think most consumers wouldn’t be interested in something like this. The likelihood of something like this may go up if more Wi-Fi deals are made, but I still give this a 25% chance.
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That’s all. We’ll see next Tuesday!