Well, it’s that time of year again, Steve Jobs is hopefully about to release some totally unexpected surprise on the Mac community, I am of course talking about MacWorld. As normal I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and make some predictions. So far my success rate has been descent but this year I feel I’m shooting in the dark much more, what with the Intel move being complete, the Macintosh line-up being all fresh and complete, and the iPod line looking pretty fresh and up-to-date too. So, now that I’ve made my excuses, on with the predictions!

[tags]MacWorld, Apple, Steve Jobs[/tags]

So, first to what I think we won’t get. I don’t think we’ll get a new computer released, I don’t think we’ll get a new traditional iPod and I don’t think we’ll get Leopard. The reason I don’t expect any new computers from Apple is that their line-up seems complete to me. You have the MacMini, the iMac, the MacPro, the MacBook, and the MacBookPro, what more could you want? Sure, we’ll probably hear that they are coming with faster CPUs and/or more RAM but I don’t see anything more exciting than that happening with the Macintosh range. The reason I don’t expect anything major from the traditional iPod line is similar. We just got the new Shuffle and the new Nano, and the Video iPod is also fairly recent, so again, I don’t see a gap that needs filling.

Leopard

Although I don’t expect Leopard to be launched at MacWorld I do think we’ll get is a much more detailed look at what will be in it as well as a release-date. Now that Vista is out the time seems right for Apple to show the world how far behind MicroSoft’s big white elephant is even before it makes its way out to regular users! They didn’t want to give too much away before Vista was out but now I think we’ll see Apple really starting to sell Leopard. I think that Leopard will make up the bulk of the keynote and anything else that happens will be secondary. Last year was a year of hardware with the Intel switch, I expect this to be a year of Software focused around Leopard.

iPhone?

As I said I don’t expect anything major form the traditional iPod line but I do expect a smartphone/iPod combo device of some sort, an iPhone if you will. This would actually be very cool because it really is stupid that you have to carry around a phone AND an MP3 player. Since you pretty much always have your phone with you it makes sense to stick a good MP3 player into one. I’d also expect any such iPhone to do internet and email and all that so basically a BlackBerry with iTunes. If we see anything other than an iPhone added to the iPod line it will probably be a new Video iPod with a bigger screen. I definitely expect to see that some time this year but I don’t expect to see it at MacWorld.

Home Entertainment

I expect to see lots of nice graphs showing how much of a success TV programs and movies have been on the iTunes store. I expect this to be followed by a list of country stores that they will be rolling movies and TV shows out to, and then I expect the launch of the iTV. It’s very unlike Apple to give previews so the fact that they previewed iTV last September implies to me that it should be ready to launch at MacWorld. I have to say I quite like this idea and assuming the price is reasonable I expect to be buying one pretty much straight away.

My Dream – the iTablet

I’ve been saying for years that I want Apple to do a tablet computer and I still want one. From reading the Apple related news reports there seems to be some movement in that direction with tantalizing hints in the form of job adverts and patent fillings but I don’t dare to expect it. I’m confident that we’ll see a Mac Tablet some time in the next three years but I don’t think it will be at this MacWorld.

Conclusions

So, in short I expect to hear lots about Leopard, very little about the Macintosh line (apart from the usual gloating about its greatness 🙂 ), and a good bit about iTunes in the form of the iTV, movies for more people and a cool iPhone. Now I just have to wait a few days to be proven wrong 🙂