Sort of  unrelated, I’m going to be moving this blog to one of the new shared hosting servers at Joyeur soon. They bought Textdrive awhile back and since I’m a very “on-top-of-it” web admin, I’m just now migrating my domains over to the new servers. I also bought motoringbliss.net last month, but have yet to do anything with it. Most likely, this blog’s content will be moved to that domain seeing as how I now longer have a Beetle.

Also, I haven’t posted anything about it here, but I’ve been dating a great girl for the last 3-3.5 months. It’s going great! So that’s a freebee update! Now back to your regularly scheduled nothingness.

In response to, and mostly expanding on, the TUAW staff’s predictions, here are my predictions for next week’s Steve-note!

1. iPhone updates

   1. 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).

   2. 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.

2. Steve will demo the next version of iTunes (7.6?), which will be necessary for the following:

   1. Video Rentals – With all the clues found in the current version, this will hit eventually (90% chance).

   2. 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).

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see modest refreshes to the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and/or iMac product lines (60% chance).

6. Miscellaneous predictions

   1. Airport Express 2.0 with 802.11N support (50% chance).

   2. 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.

   3. 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.

   4. 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.

That’s all. We’ll see next Tuesday!

This is Cowpens, SC after hanging out with the MINI crew.

Nothing more to add to the flickr caption!

2007 MINI Cooper S
Premium, Sport, Cold Weather and Audio Packages
Black Lounge Leather with white piping
Interior Chrome bits
Anthracite head liner
and last but not least, Driving lamps!

I’m holding out announcing the color because I just want it to be a surprise to folks (though most people have at least some idea what I picked)! :) Anyway, the car will be here in six to eight weeks, just in time for Christmas! (By the way, in case you missed it, it’s only EIGHT WEEKS UNTIL CHRISTMAS! hehe)

As far as the MINI goes, I still haven’t pulled the trigger yet since I think I’ve fallen behind a little bit in my savings. Not sure yet how much though. I don’t think it’s a lot, but we’ll see. In any case, I’ll figure it out and then maybe take a trip to G’ville Tuesday night after work if it looks good on the order. And no, don’t ask what color I’m going to get, it’s going to be a surprise! I do have a good idea which one it will be though! ;)

Somewhere off the Blue Ridge Parkway, I think this is Hwy 215. It was a beautiful day for shooting fall colors even if it wasn’t the best for waterfalls. Besides, it was nice not to be at work!