One week to WWDC – My Predictions

The WWDC 2008 is only one week away. What is in store? Well, only Steve knows for sure but its going to be exciting, that’s for sure. 

In light of the delay in the Montevina mobile chipset from Intel, I’ve scrubbed out the idea that MacBook Pro and MacBook updates will ship in June. There is an outside chance the MBPro could be announced and not ship until the middle of July when the chipset gets shipped. Intel’s official line is that they’re having paperwork problems related to the WiMax antennas. Of course, if this were true, it would be possible for them to ship the WiMax-less version of Montevina now and just wait on the WiMax stuff for their Echo Peak module.

So what do I think will happen? Well Apple will be prepared. I think they knew Intel was behind on Montevina, and they decided to update the iMac a while back with faster CPU FSB speeds to compensate for a lack of Montevina (which was supposed to launch in May back in January).

The dead-on, no-brianer, 100% choice is the 3G iPhone. From there though, its just wild speculation on what it will and wont do, what the prices will be, if it’ll come in colors, etc. If I had to pick a configuration and price, it would be a $399 16GB iPhone with GPS and video recording capabilities, with an outside chance of video phone calls. The phone would be released on June 27th, along with the 2.0 Firmware and probably the AppStore.

I would also assert that a final release of the SDK and firmware, including all the information about the iPhone’s new features (GPS, etc), would happen at WWDC. Developers will have a two and a half week sprint to the finish (myself included) to get their programs ready for the AppStore. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to have Apple delay the AppStore debeut until mid to late July so that developers can get their hands on the new 3G iPhone and test their software on that platform as well (the simulator probably wont cut it when it comes to advanced features like video recording and processing capabilities). This would be good for me as I have to write my iPhone game from scratch (remember kids, back up your data or pay the price!). The other side of that coin however is Apple releasing the phone earlier (either that Friday or the following Friday, June 13th and 20th respectively) with 1.x firmware that doesn’t support the new features (developers would be allowed of course to load the 2.0 firmware on them and test them before June 27th).

I have been against the idea of subsidies for iPhones because I think it would throw a major wrench in the simple product pricing schemes Apple has devised. You have sub-$100 shuffles, $150/200 nanos, and $250/350 classics. In the touchscreen category, you have the $300/400/500 touch and the $400/500 iPhone, with the iPhone costing $100 more than the equivalently-sized iPod Touch. And this is where the crux lies – if Apple and AT&T were to subsidize the iPhone at $200, then you have a (perspective) 16GB 3G iPhone selling for (after subsidy) $199. Meanwhile, assuming no other price adjustments, a 16GB touch would be $399. A huge spread.

There are a few ways out of this – one (and in my opinion most likely) is to adjust the touch prices at the same time as the iPhone announcement, so that the 8GB touch would sell for $250 and the 16GB touch would sell for $299, and the 32GB would sell for $399. This would happen to dovetail quite nicely with Apple’s summer sale for college students – when they purchase a qualifying Apple Computer (any computer except for the mini), they’ll get a free 8GB iPod touch.  Apple would be able to clear out 8GB touch stock, and prepare for the traditional September iPod refresh (64GB touch? possibly, maybe a redesign helps and provides longer battery life).

The other most probable way out of this is to not bring the price down compared to 3G iPhones – we’ll end up seeing 8GB 3G iPhones for $399 and 16GB iPhones $499 at launch, with a possible 32GB iPhone launching in early 2009 (oddly enough, about the time the next density level of flash chips – 128Gb I believe -starts shipping). Though I can see consumers being skeptical of this because they might expect that Apple might drop prices in a few months like last year.

There are a few other options, one of which is revamping the entire iPod lineup, though that seems unlikely at this point in time, I’m sure the folks at Apple have had their hands full with the 3G iPhone launch and haven’t really had time to overhaul the iPod line.

What else could be around the corner? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a MacBook Air refresh, though again, the Montevina delay puts a big damper on this possibility. One quick possibility would be a SSD refresh – SuperTalent will announce tomorrow they’re immediately shipping a 120GB 1.8″ SATA SSD  with read/write speeds of 120MB and 40MB per second, which is a big performance leap (in read speed at least) of the current SSD drive shipping in the MacBook Air. However I believe the current SSD is PATA, not SATA so it would require the MBAir’s hardware to be updated to support the new micro-SATA interface.

Usually, Apple has three big items to present. So far, I have two very likely, the 3G iPhone and the final SDK for the iPhone, and even those could be counted as one item tied together. So what else could Apple introduce? The tablet is a possibiliy but I’m inclined to think that it would get its own special event. This way, they can go over the device and address all of its innovative features (which I’m sure it will have at least one, Apple isn’t a me-too company, and if it isn’t unique in some way, above and beyond just working well, they wont sell it). Plus, I would expect a tablet to use a low power PPC chip designed by the semi company they just acquired a while back, and that might take a while to finish (I’ll assume that they had already started one) so we might not see it until MWSF 2009.

The announcement of OSX 10.6? This is probably the most likely of all the odd-ball chances you could come up with, if you consider that Apple wants 18-24 months between OS releases, now would be a good time to talk about it since its been 7 months since 10.5 Leopard (which leaves 11-17 months, and WWDC wont happen again for another 12 months). As to what to expect in 10.6? I haven’t the slightest. I’m sure we’ll see a new big Core-Something API. Maybe something for the developers – a managed language? Unlikely, but the long term goal of running a managed language (a la Java or .NET) on OS X and possibly the phone when they’re powerful enough (Atom in 2012 perhaps) isn’t that crazy of an idea. I can tell you what 10.6 wont do though – drop PPC support. I wouldn’t expect that for a while, probably 10.7 in 2011, at that point Intel Macs will have been around for around 5 years and way more powerful (4 and 8-core Sandy Bridge, the successor to Nehalem, on the 32nm platform and 4-8GB of memory – the MacPros could have two sockets for a total of 16 cores, 32 hardware threads and 12GB of RAM thanks to tri-channel memory). They might even drop 32-bit Intel support (early Intel Macs – all the Core Duo-based platforms – Mini, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMacs released in early to mid-2006) and go strict 64-bit Intel OS support. Your apps can still run in 32-bit but the OS will require a 64-bit Intel processor.

That’s it for my predictions for now.  I may post other thoughts as the week goes by and things develop.