Apples New Year starts tomorrow
Its this time of the year again. All the mac fanatics do nothing else then clicking through numerous Apple rumor sites. The lawsuits are in the air and there seems to be only one god to worship. Well I am just watching the same rituals as every year with a lot of humor. It will be like always lots of hype lots of dissapointed people after the keynote - last hopes until the "one more thing" is done and in a week or two everyone will say how brilliant Apple is or how much they like the new expensive toys they just bought. Its actually the first year that I will make my personal projections public.
Is Apple really getting down low and offering TWO cheap products at the same event? If so that would clearly mean that Apple is after the market share and cares not much about anything else. In case you have not followed the rumors (and they are hard to overlook even if you surf to normal tech sites like heise or the FAZ - one of germanys biggest newspapers or the NewYorkTimes name it and it writes about big ol stevenotes rumors) the pipes are full of "confirmed" rumors of the flash based iPod and the sub $500 mac. It seems that these two items have now reached a state of the most confirmed rumor I have ever seen. I do believe Apple will come out with a "cheap" Flash based iPod. The price you hear is $149 and for that its pretty impressive but I do not see the market. If you shell out a lot of money you get a big iPod if you have no money you go for one of the really really cheap (less then $50) flash based MP3 sticks, but given Apples brand name with the iPod and the marketing power they will sell enough of these to justify R&D cost. So given that this is a go what about the "cheap" mac? I do not believe in that - it would nullify Apples very very long commitment to have high class premium priced hardware that is of certain quality but I would never say never only with a "but" - the "but" is if Apple indeed comes out with such a lowcost machine it will have some kind of killer Application in its bundle that noone knows about yet. Some UeberMediaManager that records radio, TV, plays DVD has a DVD library and makes Toast. I truly believe that if Apple comes out with such a beast it will be more then $499 something like $599 just to be more expensive but then in turn will add DVD burning capabilities realtime MPG2 encoding, Video Input and at least one big harddrive to store all the stuff. For such a machine the subsystem does not have to be totally high end. An older graphic card (if the MPG2 is on a seperate chip) a medium G4 (around 1 Ghz) and some 512 MB Ram would do nicely. It will then have Wavelan build in so because Steve hates cables (maybe the "one more thing" is something we call funkstrom ;).
Realistically I do see Jobs on stage saying "today all the pieces of our digital hub stragedy fall in place and this is the center piece". You know that setup/homeserver kind of thingy that does it all but not much more. I do not see him standing there telling the world "Oh we are entering the cheap PC market here is our beige box for $499" - it will not happen!
As for the other rumors - well Keynote v2 is a given - iLife 05 as well (otherwise they would have never started calling the packages in years rather then with version numbers - it looks old if its from last year you know) as with the wordprocessor well Appleworks needs an update even if its just so it does run under Tiger flawlessly and why not rewrite an app like this in cocoa rename it and release it as part of an office suit that gets its pieces in two year intervals. What about this mysterious firewire audio interface that is not so overly revolutionary but the whistle blower got slapped with a lawsuit. Personally I think Apple has something bigger to hide this year and most of the lawsuits given out try to detract us from the really missing link. I think the Audio Interface might also point to this but different then what people thought. I think it might be a series of Interfaces that will ship with this $499 Mac. Maybe you add the inputs through firewireinterface to your liking. Like want to record TV you buy this firewire interface, want to record radio or other audio you buy the other firewire interface and it all somehow connects beautifully to this mac casing without adding clutter. Could be or Apple is boring again this year and just release a firewire audio interface.
Powerbooks? No G5 Powerbooks for sure. If they indeed announce G5 Powerbooks it will be at least three month until the first person in Europe gets its hand on one and given that Apple got burned in the past for announcing products that it was not able to ship soon enough they rather not announce it at all. I guess a rather modest speed bump, updated graphic card some more memory and make it cheaper? If apple is going the way of introducing cheaper stuff then I think it will make all things across the line cheaper and the Powerbook could really get a little of of its current pricing.
G5 Towers? Noone is talking about them the XServe jsut got updated to 2.3 Ghz the largest Powermac is at 2.5 if there would be faster chips available Apple would have put them in the Xserve so again there will be no major announcement on this front.
So I predict a pretty boring consumer oriented keynote. Those that crave for power will be put off until WWDC in June/July. If you are a fan of the iPod you will have some fun and if you are in the dire need of a settop box or a cheap computer to surf on you might have fun as well.
I am just not sure what his one more thing will be this year. It could be the babyiPod maybe steve throws at least one bone to the pros during the keynote? Maybe the Pros for one time get a one more thing?
What will dominate the keynote will be how well Apple is doing financially and in raw numbers in the music store and mp3 player bussiness. Also what will take at least half an hour will be a Tiger Preview with all the things everyone already knows. There have been times when I was looking forward to the Stevenotes but since this event turned more and more into a consumer oriented show I can care less and less.