On the eve of WWDC ‘08

‘Tis the time again. WWDC is coming in less than 12 hours (that’s half a day!), and the Apple fan club here at TechNest Report and around the world is waiting… waiting what shiny new gadgets uncle Steve will give us the opportunity to buy. What useful, sexy, and Apple-branded products will we learn of tomorrow? Here is Alex’s prediction run-up so far:

iPhone/iPod Touch:

iPhone take 2.
- New, slimmer form factor with colored back-covers.
- 3G HSDPA/UMTS, built-in GPS, 16-32GB of storage space.
- Subsidized through ATT and world-wide partner carriers: $200 (with a contract). Price unlocked directly from Apple:$400+.
- Copy and paste, App Store (obviously), and a non-recessed head-phone jack.
- A2DP Bluetooth goodness for listening to music with a wireless headset (I’m surprised the current iPhone still doesn’t have it).
iPhone take 1 and iPod Touch gets the 2.0 firmware and all the features that come with that.
Plethora of 3rd party iPhone/iPod Touch software.
Rebranded and re-written .Mac service
- New name: .Me.
- Over-the-air (OTA) sync of calendars, address book, bookmarks, pictures, documents.
- Push email
- Here’s the punchline: avaialble API. Developers can write their own plugins for the new .Me. For example: AWS, developers of the great 1Password application will give me an app that will sync my 1Password keychain from my iBook to .Me and to my iPhone, and the other way as well. What this will do is directly compete with Microsoft’s new Mesh service, which is striving to accomplish the same thing also with an open programming architecture. By the way, .Me is now also available for Windows.
- Pricing for the .Me is going to determine its success. Purchased with an iPhone, .Me is free for a year, discounted yearly rate thereafter. Purchased separately from an iPhone (with an iPod Touch, for example), users pay a monthly or a yearly fee, one that is less than the current $100 per year (one can only hope that’s the case). Storage plans for current features of .Mac, such as website hosting and back-up are to increase while keeping plan prices the same as they are today. For example, Apple will charge $4 a month, $40 a year for .Me when purchased separately from an iPhone. This basic plan will have 10GB of storage space on .Mac and thus 10GB of bandwidth to sync between devices. For $6 a moth, $65 a year, users will get 30GB of storage and bandwidth space. And so on.
- Another feature of the new .Me: the ability to pipe through to your Time Capsule and any Mac/PC on the network. This way, users can retrieve any file from a home Mac or PC, as well as browse and listen to streaming music/video from an external drive attached to the Time Capsule.

Mac

Preview of next version of OS X.
- Intel only.
- Not as many new features and changes as Leopard. The focus of this release is code optimization and efficiency.
- One of the new prominent features: ZFS.
- Improved Spaces functionality with the ability to assign a desktop to each space.
New MacBook. This relaunches the MacBook and the MacBook Pro lines.
- 13, 15, and 17″ models.
- Aluminum and glass.
- GPS, WWAN, Wireless USB, WiMax built-in.
- Price is no longer directly tied to screen size as it is now.
- Prices start at $999, $1099, and $1199, for the respective screen sizes.
- Each notebook size is configurable exactly to the liking of the customer. The Pro versions will have top-of-the-line hardware and will be differentiated by being all black. This means that I will be able to get a MacBook Pro 13″ with a real GPU - like a GT8800 for ~$1600, and I will be able to configure a 15″ or 17″ MacBook without a GPU for ~$1099 and ~$1199, respectively.
- There is a enough demand for both of these examples and will introduce the Mac to markets that have been looking at the product but discouraged by the $2000 price tag of the current 15″ MacBook Pro. The attractiveness of the lower price point of Mac notebooks will far outweigh the lowered margins. And here is a plea from myself: please don’t charge $2000 for the same hardware that Dell charges $1500 for. It’s a blatant rip off. (MacBook Pro 15″ vs. Dell XPS 1530 come to mind).
Mac Tablet.
- iPod touch, but bigger.
- More than 2-finger gestures.
- Unlikely for today’s event.