2009 Predictions

Its New Year’s Eve and I’m sitting at home, by myself and incredibly bored. So I figured I should write up predictions for what I think will happen next year.

Energy

• Obama’s administration pushes hard on solar and wind, geothermal doesn’t get the love it deserves, but it still does well, even in the face of the bad economy
• Wind power starts to take off in the inter-mountain west – places like Idaho, Wyoming, etc. As plans and deals are finalized to provide for the construction of transmission lines from these remote areas down to the population centers of the west and southwest (Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix), plans scale up for installation.
• Solar does OK, the financial crisis hurts solar the most, hurts being a relative term. Obama pushes solar, especially rooftop solar in low to middle income areas to allow residents to not have to worry about the volatility of energy prices (modeled after the million rooftops initiative in California). Utilities don’t like it because distributed generation makes their demand patterns irregular.

Technology

• BluRay doesn’t take off because of the bad economy. People aren’t going to give up their cheaper DVDs until 2010 or 2011.
• The prices of LCDs comes down 25% by year’s end, but mostly because factories want to get them out the door to try and pay for the facilities they built to handle the LCD ramp up.
• Nothing big comes out – no big technological revolution (iPhone, etc). Everyone is trying to tool up for the exit of the recession and hope they can pounce at the right time.
• The Web 2.0 comes to a grinding halt – companies have a hard time finding VC. And sadly, one of the casualties is a major site.

Apple

• Apple doesn’t reveal an iPhone nano. They might reduce the price of the current iPhone devices, and add a 32GB iPhone, but the current rumormill is really just to ferret out leaks, I don’t think Steve was too happy about the iPhone 3G leaks.
• Nehalem/Core i7 Mac Pros are released, possibly using desktop parts in a glueless 2-socket system using the X58 chipset. This would reduce costs and bring the price down.
• Notebooks and the iMac (and the mini) don’t get Nehalem chips this year, set to land early/mid 2010. They cruise along on Intel’s incremental speed bumps over the course of 2009.
• A MacBook Air refresh in the first half of the year, cheaper SSDs and the new Intel 2.13Ghz SFF processor. This increases the Air purchases because it doesn’t look like its hobbled in terms of processor speeds.
• No Netbook, no xMac (mid-range desktop tower), no new media server/media center/htpc (the new Mini might be a good HTPC, but nothing specifically targeted at that niche).
• Apple TV continues to not make waves in the mainstream, gets hardware rev to go to the Ion platform. Gets lots of attention in the hacker/modder community for apps like Boxee.

Anything Else

• I’m still single this time next year. Mom gets on my case more about finding a girl, getting married, having kids, etc.
• My stock picks in tech and renewables give me a 50% increase in 2009. Too bad I didn’t invest more.
• I cant stick to my 30 month stock picking plan ($2,000 each into 5 emerging stocks, on 2 or 3 of the stocks hoping for returns measured in multiples).