The Apple World Wide Developer Conference is on next week (7-11 August), and starts with Steve Jobs doing his annual sermon to the faithful. Traditionally he’ll be announcing some shiny new products. This is then the appropriate time for wild speculation about what will get announced. Here are some guesses and thoughts for myself [Updated to add the results]:
- No iPhone. At least, not yet. Why announce this to a bunch of developers? They’re not the key market, and they probably all have Treos anyway. If this is going to happen, it’ll be at a special press event or MacWorld. [Correct]
- Similarly, no new iPod. Just not the right audience, and not the same opportunity to build up a ‘buzz’. [Correct]
- New Macs, without a doubt. I will be astonished if they don’t announce the new Mac Pros, it’s such a clear gap in the product line up. Plus this is a big chunk of the main target market. [Correct]
- Probably a bump to the specs for the MacBook Pros. The gap between the Pro and consumer laptops is a little small, so I guess something will happen here. [Nope]
- A bunch of OS X stuff, obviously, but I’m not across the details of the rumors here. No virtualisation, no new finder, but some new feature no one even realised we’d need (a la Dashboard) would be my guess. [Yep, I’d count Time Machine as meeting that]
- Finally, in the ‘no one else is saying anything’: Apple may finally get around to the tablet PC that they’ve clearly been doing R&D on. Why now? Because they’ll need developers to work on new apps for it, to take advantage of pen based interfaces. This is a very right field prediction, but I really hope its true. My pre-order will be in by the end of the day if it is! [Sadly, nope]
I’ll get back to you with how accurate I am after the keynote on the 7th (8th August Australia time).