Monday, January 08, 2007

Reading the Goat Entrails

Since I *love* reading the tea leaves and sloshing the goat entrails to predict the future, I thought I’d throw my MWSF predictions out. I used to wave a dead chicken over my iPod, but that didn’t work out so well last time. Got chicken juice on my iPod and it’s hard to get that smell out of a consumer electronics device. And Apple refuses to honor the warranty on chicken soaked iPods. Goat entrails, while messy, are a *much* better predictor of future events than merely looking at the stars, reading Mac rumor sites or just plain guessing, as any decent prognosticator knows.

So herewith are my *official* predictions about MacWorld 07:

Spreadsheet added to iWork. (boring!) probably called “Numbers” or something equally as banal. Yawner.

The iTV thing. But I’m betting that you can buy order one day of the show. They’ll be ready to ship, basically. They pre-announced it, after all. I have huge hate for all DVRs these days (mostly because I don’t have a Tivo, I know), so I’m standing by with AmEx in hand for this one. :-] I’m guessing that besides the Universal remote the thing ships with, you’ll be able to control the device from your laptop or even better, remotely.

iPhone. But the cool thing will be .Mac integration. Address Book, iCal integration, that sort of thing. Something about taking advantage of all the phone’s features. I have to say that I have no idea about this one, of course. But I also have zero excitement about an iPhone, but that’s mostly because I think it’s about un-possible that the network providers will sign on for it. They want to make money by forcing *you*, the subscriber, to do everything over their network, i.e. the stuff that makes them money. Which is why they charge $2 for a wallpaper, ringtones, etc. The Apple way is a bit more of a “it’s your device, use it how you see fit.” Sort of. I mean, you don’t have to buy music from the iTMS in order to use an iPod, right?

Major re-vamping of .Mac. Might actually be worth it. .Mac turns into some kind of dead simple, hosting, blogging, podcasting extravaganza. Take a photo with your fancy new iPhone and you can auto-magically upload it to your .Mac account. That sort of thing.

Adobe will demo CS3 (specifically, a Universal version of Photoshop) during the keynote. To be released before I die, hopefully.

More studios sign on for movie releases on iTunes.

The wicked awesome Leopard feature set will come down. And there will be some snarky remark about how since Vista is locked down now, they felt it would be OK to show more Leopard features. That whole “Redmond, start your photocopiers thing” that they went nuts with at WWDC ‘06. iWeb will be re-vamped to become useful. Possibly it will be integrated into a Ruby on Rails thing, since Leopard Server will Ruby/Rails built in (I think that’s true, not sure and I can’t be bothered to google right now). Boot Camp/Parallels will be a standard part of the Leopard install. Boot Camp or Parallels or some other sort of virtualization will be HUGE for Apple in the long term. In the near term, it’s just geeky, although quite useful.

Though I think they *should* make a widescreen video iPod with a touch-screen click wheel, I doubt they’ll make it for this MW. He’ll also “apologize” that the iTMS was wonky on xmas day. “We’re were swamped because we sold so many iPods and ITMS gift cards. Sorry about that! We’ll bulk up next year!”

And though I’d like to see some Enterprise lovin’ coming from Apple HQ (like a 4U Xserve, with built-in XRaid capabilities, for example), I doubt it will happen. *sigh* A nerd boy can dream, though.

I think the iTV doo-dad will be the most interesting thing at the show. If last year was the “Year of the Laptop,” this year will be the total digital convergence year. iTV + iTunes + iPhoto + big ol’ 1080p HDTV = we own your living room, biatch! Though MS has a head start on this with Media Center and the XBox 360. But they are MS, so they are a bit icky, frankly.

Also, the stock price will fall the day of the keynote. Mostly because Wall Street believes that Apple only makes iPods these days and with no new iPods announced or shown, WS will see the whole thing as a flop.

**UPDATE** Forgot about the rest of the hardware.

Something about the new Mac Pros running on eleventy-zillion-core Intel chips. And speed bumps across the board for all the laptops and iMacs. And all the new Apple displays will have iSights built in.

So that’s my reading of the “signs.” Check back tomorrow, and I’ll have changed all these to reflect what Steve actually announced, so I can prove once and for all the goat entrails are the way to go.

1. I’m excited about iWork maybe getting a spread sheet (Yes I’m that dull).  I use iWork for 90 percent of my non-spreadsheet/database stuff at work so having a spreadsheet/database integrated into iWorks would be handy.  Having OS 9 running runs down my battery a bit faster too. 

   iTV looked cool and exciting until I remembered that I hate TV.  :-)

   Posted by michael  on  01/08/07  at  12:27 PM

2. We are totally converted on Keynote these days. I’m doing a training session studio-wide next week. SO much better than PowerPoint. Have really delved into Pages, though.

   It’ll be hard to top Excel, though. It such a massively useful program. Honest! No kidding. Excel and Photshop are on my list of “desert-island-you-can-only-take-five-software-programs-with-you” list.

   Posted by Jon  on  01/08/07  at  12:32 PM

3. I’m a huge Excel fan as well, it’s just way more program than I need for what I need right now.

   Pages has some nice layout stuff, really simple to use. I’m helping run a group home so I neither need nor want anything big and complex.

   Posted by michael  on  01/08/07  at  02:05 PM

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