Apple Speculation

On Tue, Apple is having an event that will announce new products. Their invitation reads "The spotlight turns to notebooks". Widely speculated are new aluminum macbooks starting at $800 a new low price point for Apple. I expect some new form factors but nothing particularly amazing. Yes they will probably be thinner. Otherwise I expect the updates to be pretty standard, faster processor, bigger disks (or SSDs), different graphics cards, maybe blu-ray as an option. I've said before I think there should be a 15" MacBook that's more affordable than the Pro.

I think last time there was some speculation about WiMax but I don't see that at all. A builtin 3G chip with the ability to get a $30 unlimited data plan from AT&T (just like with the iPhone) would be appealing to many. i suspect such a thing will wait a year or two for AT&T to roll out more 3G coverage. Until then expect to need a USB dongle or an ExpressCard slot for this. I think A GPS chip to make use of the location services of the iPhone is a possiblity. It wouldn't be expensive or depend on a third party commercial service and there's an API established on the iPhone to make use of it.

The MacBook Pro and Air have multi-touch trackpads and I expect the MacBook to get this too. Unless they announce some kind of tablet I don't expect much more in the multi-touch department. I really think they'll keep learning with another rev of the iPhone before applying it to the notebooks in some significant way (there isn't a public API defined yet). People miss the 12" PowerBook form factor and for a real stretch I think a tablet with a full-size slide-out keyboard would be interesting and wouldn't compete with the MacBook Air (and could be called a 'brick").

I wonder about a new iWork or iLife. Both are currently at an '08 release but were released August 7, 2007, so they could be due. The next big opportunities for announcements are MacWorld in January (when the Desktop machines will probably be updated) and Snow Leopard's expected ship next summer.

As far as iWork, I'd expect some small improvements to Keynote including some new ways to highlight animations effects that got easier to add in '08. Numbers will probably get a lot more features including many more functions and hopefully conditional formating based on formulas. I also expect better graphs. I've been pretty happy with Pages, the only big things it's missing are outlining, indexes, bibliographies and math equations and I'm not sure they'd add any of these (outlining is most likely). it would be nice if there were ways of including tables and charts from Numbers in Pages documents. Auto-save should definitely be added and it would be great if it could edit HTML natively.

I don't expect a database application like Access and I doubt there would be an Entourage or Outlook competitor added. Snow Leopard will contain native support for Exchange servers so they might want to leverage that. Also I think they'll wait till Snow Leopard has been out for a while so they can drop Tiger support and depend on the new calendar/todo services introduced in Leopard. That would make the upgrade easier.