the-ish.com/blog

I’m going to jump into the fray and offer up my predictions. It’ll be nice to have a record of how well i do.

These are my Macworld 2007 predictions, but also my 2007-in-general predictions: i’m open to any of these happening anytime throughout the year. :) Please keep in mind: this is total speculation. You know how this works.

Absolutely Will Happen (100%)

• More information about Leopard, potentially an announcement of availability date. Definitely some new “secret features” to be shown off.
• iWork and iLife ’07
• Very Good Looking Sales Figures (in the face of plenty of bad press concerning money and legal troubles)
• Incremental Hardware refreshes and spec-bumps – I’m looking at you, iMac.
• Demonstration of Adobe’s CS3 (finally) on a MacPro
• Demonstration of a working iTV, final product name (Airport Video?), availability date
• We’ll be given some sort of information about the state of the stand-alone iSight.
• Mention of The Beatles on iTS [added 1.6.07]

Probably Will Happen (80%)

• “One More Thing…” people didn’t really see coming
• Changes in the Cinema Display lineup, including built-in iSights
• Spreadsheet / Database app added to iWork
• .Mac updates
• Minor price drops on Mac hardware
• New, smaller, and somewhat less expensive stand-alone iSights
• Talk about Vista’s “Innovation” in some snide way

Good Chance (60%)

• Cinema Display lineup changed to include 17″, 20″ 24″ and 30″ (23″ discontinued, all prices lowered.)
• Announcement (though probably not availability) of a new Airport More-Extremer 802.11N Router to support iTV, and possibly a sideways remark about awaiting the standard to be ratified.
• Mac Mini gets Core2Duo or some other upgrade

The Possibility Exists (40%)

• The iPhone – people are disappointed it doesn’t give deep-tissue-massages
• Announcing iTunes 7.X with Auto Lyric Discovery (Powered by CDDB, not Magic)
• 6th Gen iPod – it doesn’t cure cancer, but among other things has more powerful graphic capabilities to spice up the interface visuals, larger screen (with low-power backlight to conserve battery? – LED?), slicker design, better battery.
• 8-core Mac Pros
• BluRay burners as a BTO option for Mac Pros

Fat Chance (Neat iDeas?) (10%)

• holy-crap i just wrote “iDeas” like that accidently.
• New smaller stand-alone iSights can plug into iPod for pointless You-Tube quality home videos
• Ultralight Macbook
• Wireless iPod / “True Video iPod” / Touch-screen iPod
• DVD burning for videos from the iTunes Store
• iTV is High Definition, and iTS is now selling HD content (though this cant be too terribly far down the road.)
• Software/Hardware is made available for DVR functionality / recording and streaming television to the iTV
• Some sort of resurrection of the Cube, or other monitor-less low-end desktop with upgradeability and more power than the mini. possibly a Mac Mini Pro

No Way (0%)

• Mac Tablet
• iPhone is release, available immediately, is a smart-phone and heralded as the Newton 2007. (and is wildly successful)
• Ultralight Macbook Pro
• some kind of keyboard replacement (inkwell related) that will slowly break us of our dependence on our “clunky keyboards”
• Running Windows programs Natively in 10.5
• Everyone walks away satisfied: no blogs are heard saying “how disappointing” or “that’s lame”
• Any sort of iTS Rental Service (exploding media, 3 plays or 3 months, etc)
  [added 1.6.07]
• Any sort Apple Videogame Console (not including iPod videogames, smartass)
  [added 1.6.07]
• iPhone with mobile video conferencing
  [added 1.6.07]

Those are my current speculative thoughts. I’ll revisit them both next week, and at the end of this year.