Episode #007
We'll postpone our regular episode of For Mac Eyes Only until after Steve Job's keynote speech at Macworld Expo in San Francisco tomorrow.
The rumors ARE flying like Frisbees however, and everyone seems to be betting on one thing: the "iPhone"
I'm getting a little nervous about my prediction that the "iPhone" won't appear until at least April -- if ever -- but I'll stand by my word, and all my other predictions as well.
So I thought I'd take a moment and type up a quick recap of the For Mac Eyes Only predictions from the past few weeks:
FMEO Predictions Round 1: (December 11, 2006)
Apple will buy Parallels and incorporate its functionality into Leopard.
I realize I was climbing out onto a rather precipitous limb here, but after making this prediction, Parallels made a number of changes that seem to support my reasoning behind this. They included support for running off of your Boot Camp partition, they added the ability to "dock" your Windows applications and the drag and drop between OS X and Windows is now seamless. All it takes now is a little more tweaking to smoothen out some of the quirkier quirks and Apple's blessing and we've got a winner on our hands.
FMEO Predictions Round 2: (December 18, 2006)
8-Way Mac Pro.
Since making this prediction, I've seen it pop up on a number of other sites as well. Why not? It's been shown before that the new quad-core chips are drop in replacements for the current dual-core Xeons being used now. My fear is that Apple will only put ONE proccy in the lowest end Mac Pros and if you want and Octo-Mac, you'll have to dump upwards of 3 - 4K to get it.
Consumer Cinema Display.
At $699 and up, the Cinema Displays have always been targeted at the "pro" user. It does not make sense to me that Apple would sell a headless Mac mini, but offer no option for the buyer to get a reasonably priced display to go along with it? Does it make sense to ask the buyer of a $599 Macintosh to pay $699 for the display on top of that (as well as a keyboard and mouse)?
Rumors of other display sizes have popped up, but the majority of folks seem to think a built in iSight is what we'll see introduced on any new line of Cinema Displays. Err, yeah, I missed that prediction ... dang!
No iPhone.
My thinking is that because of the level of involvement needed from others in the industry (cell phone carriers namely), it would be extremely difficult to keep something like this under wraps. That's my thinking anyway.
FMEO Predictions Round 3: (January 1, 2007)
iTV Finalized, Named and Delivered.
There are too many companies jumping on the bandwagon since Apple announced their intent to produce the "iTV" for Apple to ignore. The iTV needs to come out with a bang and what better place to do so than at Macworld Expo with the eyes of the entire world on Jobs?
Widescreen iPod.
Unlike everyone else tittering about the iPhone, I'm thinking Jobs will finally throw us a bone and release the widescreen video iPod. What better companion for the iTV than that and let's not forget it would be Jobs' opportunity to drive the last nails into the sarcophagus of the Zune.
iLife '07 and iWork '07.
These are just assumed. We're looking for better podcasting support in Garageband, an improved iPhoto and a new spreadsheet application in iWork. If these two are NOT released, I think people we be much more surprised than if they are.
OS X Leopard.
I think that Steve Jobs wants to get the drop on Vista. Folks who've seen Leopard say it's pretty stable and good to go. There are just a few key things missing and those are the things we've not been told about yet. Tightly wrapped under NDAs, those who DO know can't say anything. Beating Microsoft to the punch by getting Leopard in the hands of consumers before Vista arrives on January 31st would be a big win ... and Steve Jobs likes to win.
So there ya have it, a short recap of the predictions we made here at For Mac Eyes Only over the past few weeks. After the keynote tomorrow we'll release another episode with a recap of what really went down. I did this because I thought it was important to get them all down on paper so when every one of them is proven wrong you can all laugh in my face.
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MEO-007-010807 (10'59, 5.1mb, 64kbps)
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