My predictions for the Macworld 2008 Keynote

It is indeed that time of year again. It's the one day of the year when office workers living on the east coast set up a dedicated monitor for tracking key blogs and websites, waiting for the keynote to begin. Invariably, someone from one of the news sites is there with a camera in the audience and a laptop, and a wireless broadband connection...and they're blogging, twittering, flickering, and doing all kinds of unspeakable things to their computer... all in the name of satiating the unending thirst that people have for all things Jobsian.

Who am I to break with the tradition of spinning wild flights of fancy in the spirit of Apple lovers everywhere and calling them predictions? Just about every site on the net that is even remotely related to technology is now fully caught up in the buzz and hype and has posted their predictions for what fantastically cool new gadget that Apple will produce. In my typical cynical fashion, I have been quoted as saying that Steve Jobs could walk off stage, head to the mens room, come back on stage with the um... net result ... call it an iCrap, and the audience would roar with ecstatic frenzy and worship the new gadget as though it had been brought down from the mountain by Moses himself.

So, all kidding and cynicism aside, here's what I think we're going to see today:

• Ultraportable touchy-feely tablety thingy. No matter what site you go to, someone has a rumor somewhere about the new smaller form factor Macbook. Some people thing it's going to be a glorified iPod Touch that is somewhere between the size of a phone and the size of a Macbook. I don't particularly agree, but here are the features that _I_ think will be on the device:
  • Smaller than a Macbook
  • Bigger than an atom
  • Has multi-touch
  • Also has a stylus
  • Probably has an external optical drive.
• Blu-Ray. I'm thinking there's going to be some kind of big bru-ha-ha about how from now on all the SuperDrives in the Macs are going to support Blu-Ray, which would essentially spell the end of the HD-DVD format. This is just totally my own opinion. The great thing about opinions is that they can be right, or wrong, and nobody cares! yay me!
• Starbucks. We will probably see a demo of how fantastically easy our iPhones will make our overpriced purchase of over-roasted high-fat super-sweetened coffee products.
• iPhone with high-speed G3 support. yay. I think we all knew this was coming, but I really couldn't care less. It's like someone telling you that next year, Ford will make a 2009 version of the same car they made for 2008. Woohoo thanks Captain Obvious!!
• iPhone SDK. I'm hoping Steve will reveal some details, not necessarily about  the SDK, but about the pipeline through which all legal iPhone developers must jump in order to get their apps onto the iPhone. I'm guessing that if he discusses the SDK at all, he'll reveal that iPhone apps will be downloaded and purchased through the wifi iTunes store... another huge shocker.

Well, that's pretty much all I've got... I'm sure they will do the usual product line upgrades to the MacPro and the Macbook Pro, but that's all incremental stuff we expect anyway. I also fully expect a brand new set of Saturday Night Live skits spoofing the reality distortion field that is a Steve Jobs keynote.

And no, I will not be posting up-to-the-minute updates about the latest detail from the keynote. I'll just post to let you know when I've pre-ordered my "subnotebook/ultramobile/touchy tablety thingy". I'm sure they'll come up with a better name for it than that.

** Gah - looks like the keynote isn't until tomorrow. How will I manage to withstand the anticipation??

tags: macworld  keynote  predictions  apple  

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