ilife 06 is the no brainer. I expect it will come with Front Row.
iwork needs an upgrade too. eventually it should have all the components of AppleWorks but be better. Not sure what’s taking apple so long
I’ve seen the airport express video rumor for the last 6 months. I think the technology is there. The market is there. I think its real likely.
and if there is an airport express video, then it follows that the ilife components will have some kind of airport video feature. itunes all ready has airtunes. but what about sending video podcasts and tv shows along. iMovie and iphoto should allow you to send movies and slide shows to your tv. It would need some kind of buffer to get the audio and video synched. Plus some kind of relay so that your remote in your living room can control you computer in some other part of the house. Could be a little pricey but i see this as the perfect way to make a mac your digital hub and not have in in the livingroom.
a new ipod shuffle. not too sure about this one. But the shuffle has been out there for a year. I can’t see them increasing the capacity or decreasing the price. Maybe they can make it thinner and give a choice of white or black. I think it would be cool if it looked like an even smaller nano.
a preview of OS 10.5 We had a preview of tiger at last years. But i think apple has been pretty busy making the OS work on intels so leopard may not be out that soon.
the intel mac mini. I think not. It would give it good timing for school districts to purchase them in the spring. But i don’t expect to see them announced till the spring. I don’t think the OS is ready.
the intel ibook. not this soon.maybe summer. I’m sort of suspecting the ibook and powerbook line to meld. 12, 14, 15 and 17 inch screens. All with pentium Ms. Probably about $300 apart. Maybe each one about 300ghz apart too. Possibly the 12” would be around $800 and 1.6 ghz. like ipods you would have a choice of white or black in each model.
I have a hard time going against Think Secret’s track record. If they say there will be an Intel machine I have no reason not to believe them. Since I am going to be sitting somewhere in that conference hall, I am hoping that SJ will pull a HUGE WOW out of his hat for us. I hope I am not spending all this money to go see iLife 06, iWorks 2 and a new iPod Shuffle. That would make me very sad.
I expect his Steveness to announce some kind of Intel-based laptop at the MacExpo 2006 keynote address, but the delivery of said laptop would not be until Feb or March. This kind of announcement has occurred before at MacWorld 2006.
With Intel doing the dog-and-pony show with the viiv chipset, and Thinksecret’s recent “Apple Media” rumors, I think there’s a good chance we could see an Apple mini-style, Intel viiv based media unit that will play movies from the iTMS and record video PVR-style.
I remembered something else. I wouldn’t be surprised if a part of the stevenote is about video content. We just had a bunch more tv shows added. Maybe there will be more added at MacWorld. For sure a status report on it.
I can’t predict how Apple is going to move on recording broadcasted tv shows. Tivo announced that they were going to make tivo compatible with ipods and i don’t think apple has commented on it. you know there is a copywrite issue with recorded tv shows and maybe apple doesn’t want to get caught up in that. also they are making money on people buying tv shows at the itunes music store. so maybe they will just ignore it.
Or maybe they have their own elegant solution to the whole thing. A mac tv tuner with a mac dvr? Perhaps it will be part of the airport video express I expect.
The only thing that’s for sure I will chewing on my nails at least three days in advance of the presentation and drooling for another three days once Steve has made his announcements. The question is only whether fluid will be running out of my mouth or my eyes…
I know I for one would consider purchasing iLife (for the first time ever mind you) if it came with a more robust version of FrontRow and possibly a remote or option for remote. I don’t see FrontRow being worth the $0.02 for a blank CD without a remote. Also, a tie in to keynote presentations might be nice as well (even if it’s only a software hook to the remote from keynote). Also, Keynote is something I find interesting but frankly the suctastic nature of the Pages interface (and to a degree Keynote’s) keep me away. That’s at least 2 product suites that Apple could make money from me for if they meet my needs. They’ve already kindof tripped up with Aperture, though I’ll be setting up a G5 Tower with Aperture in the next week or so and I’ll hold my tongue until I’ve given it it’s paces. It currently appears from what I’ve seen that while the UI/speed is great, the actual RAW conversion quality for at least 8bpp images and possibly even 16bpp images is seriously lacking. We shall see. The instant Apple implements a respectable plugin architecture for non-destructive filters they have my $500, though, no questions asked. If only to send the message to Adobe that they should be headed in the same direction. I submitted a feature request to Adobe for this very thing before Aperture was announced÷
I want to give you my money Apple! Please! Give me an excuse!
I am curious though, are any of the Mac360 staff going to Macworld? I’ll be there, should be a blast.
I plan to be there for the Stevenote only. I think Ron is planning to go up, too. I know Tera’s stuck at home in LA for awhile longer. Jack and Carol will stay in St. Louis and lick their collective Rams Fans wounds. I don’t know about Alexis.
Chev,
iLife+Frontrow+Remote=Useless, unless your Macintosh has an infrared port we don’t know about. Maybe when you say “possibly remote or option for remote”, you were thinking remote with infrared reciever and just failed to mention it in your post. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one. I use Pages and Keynote often, and I have to come to bat for both of them. The interface is just fine and with the templates in Pages, for Christmas, I was able to whip together a family newsletter in literally 10 minutes. Keynote has features that PowerPoint for now can only dream about having, such as being able to drag a bunch of JPEG pics to the side bar and automaticly set up a new page for each image.
Everyone,
As mentioned numerous times, I will be at the Stevenote and the entire Expo for that matter. I will try to post an update as it goes along, if I can. And if anyone who is going wants, I’ll buy the first round at a local establishment after the Keynote. It’ll be 5 o’clock somewhere.
Bambi,
How are you going just for the Stevenote? Press pass? Your not going to go check out the Expo Show Floor? I’m guessing that the major software companies don’t pull the blankets off there updates at MWSF like they used to. I guess I shouldn’t expect an Adobe Internet CS with PS,DW,Flash and Illustrator???
Yes, I was trying to say “FrontRow provided a remote is available.” Though, technically, I imagine you could just use one of those older Keyspan presentation remotes, or Salling Clicker enabled bluetooth device, with no qualms. There is, also, already 2 Adobe CS2/Studio bundles, but they are not cheap by any stretch and appear just to be bundles from each company lashed together. We are about due for one of Adobe’s “yearly upgrades,” however. I’m interested to see if they don’t skip the Mac side this year in favour of MacTel development.
Interestingly, I believe the current version of Illustrator is free of the shackles of CodeWarrior, so they may be able to provide it as a Universal Binary before the other components. I don’t know though, the library sharing/interface bits in CS feel pretty incestuous so I’m not holding my breath on it being 100% clean. For instance I don’t think an intel executable can call a PPC subroutine, such as a plug-in.
As far as Pages and Keynote, I agree if you go in already having an idea of what they can do, they are excellent. Those folks I’ve seen try it out with no prior experience or expectation did a deer in headlights impression. Personally, I like the idea of Pages but I get around well enough in InDesign that Pages offers no real time savings for me, and I really like the featureset of Keynote but I think I’ve only done one project with it that didn’t bring some sort of app wierdness to the foreground. Not that I’ve tried often, mind you.
They do sell the remote, yes, however it does not come with an IR reciever for Macs. The remote works with either the dock or the IR equipped iMac, so they’d need to support some manner of reciever. I hate to say it, but I don’t know about iTV. It’s possible for Apple to stream the iTMS quality video over 802.11, and heck maybe they’ll do it, but Dave you’ll be so incredibly disappointed with VHS quality video on a 42” HD set. If Apple were to do such a thing I’d not only be not interested I’d be ticked off they decided to go forward with such a weak offering.
In my original post I didn’t think that there would be an intel mac. Seems like almost everybody else thinks there is going to be one. I just don’t think that the OS is ready yet. You’d think that there would be more leaks coming from the developers if the Intel OS was almost done. Although its crossed my mind that Apple has developed a cone of silence.
If there is an Intel OS ready to go then those Yonah chips should end up in a mac at Macworld. I find it difficult to predict which Mac it would be in. One of the rumors points to an Intel iBook, and the ibook is about the longest in the tooth of any of the mac models. But i have two problems with that. First, i heard that the yonah is a dual core 2 ghz processor. Seems like it would be faster than a powerbook. And not sure about cost but i would think those Yonahs are gonna be expensive. So price wise they might not be a good fit of the ibook. So one might think that the Yonahs are gonna go into a PB. There is supposed to be a lower performance/low power Yonah in a coupld of months. Maybe the iBooks would get those. Also Intel has another processor coming out in a couple of months that is supposed to be even better than the yonah, think its called the mermon, maybe the pb would get that and the ibook could then get the yonah.
Then there is the fact that Jobs said the mini would be the first machine to go Intel. If it got the new yonah, maybe the ibook would get the low power one in a few months. then when the mermon comes out, the powerbook could get that, and the powermac would get the desktop version. Just thinking aloud, but that seems to make a lot of sense if the yonah is cheap enough to go into mac minis and ibooks.
The Mac360 folks got together late Monday night via iChat and came up with our Top 10 List, which became Probable, Possible, and Impossible.
We could have flipped a coin. About 50-percent was all we could do.
Click Here for the ugly details and compare how you did against our collective brain, experience, knowledge, and thoughtful guesses. Seriously, a blind chimpanzee using Ubuntu and eating bananas through a straw could do better than we did.
