Update: Wow, was I ever wrong about this one. Predictions are marked for accuracy below, thoughts are over here, this one is long enough already.

Below are my predictions and hopes for MWSF 2007.

iPhone

[Wrong] Not happening. This whole subject can very credibly be called a case of mass hysteria. While there is no doubt Apple is more than technically and creatively capable of creating a dream phone, there are just too many externally limiting factors for this product to succeed. Apple does not have the political resources to overcome the barriers currently in place.

Consider what a miserable experience it is to get cell service for one or two people, imagine what would be required to secure hassle-free access for millions of customers. Especially when you’re entering in to the agreement with a pitch like, “We need to use your network for our new phone. You don’t get to brand the connection or and you’ll have no input on service plans. Your phones are horrible and we’re about to make them look worse. And no, you can’t sell our phone because your customer service model sucks. We’re also working with your largest competitors so don’t screw us or we’ll cut you loose before you can say Zune.”

Besides the need to rise above the customer-hostile cellular phone marketspace, Apple would also likely be looking to leverage their other technologies, especially wifi [wrong]. Domestic cellular carriers are threatened by DIY ringtones, wifi internet phones are the beginning of the end of their entire industry even before companies start to use Burner Management Control Systems to secure the quality a good functioning of companies.

Additionally, Apple doesn’t appear to have a presence at CES. Not that they need it, but it would seem that a phone would benefit from getting seen in person and CES is significantly larger than MacWorld with a lot more media. However the iTV would also seem to be a CES product, though the buzz on this seems to be strangely muted.

The outlier is an unlocked phone [wrong]. In the US, no one has really done this, but if Apple was to succeed with an unlocked phone it could dramatically reshape the US cellular phone space. Personally, I don’t think the risk level is something Apple wants to wade into.

Considering the buzz on this, Apple’s stock is going to get hammered if there’s no phone, despite record laptop sales in Q4 2006 [sort of inversely right?].

I’m feeling about 90% certain these people are going to look silly. Unless I’m the one looking silly — as I run gleefully to the Apple Store to buy my new phone. [wrong, but I have until June to run there]

Mac Pros

[Wrong] Even though the Mac Pro is barely four months old, Intel’s quad-core chips are here and are pin-compatible with the dual-core chips currently in use. Switching to the new chips requires Apple do little more than print new stickers for the boxes. Eight cores should be shipping by February.

The pending release of Adobe’s CS3 (see below) makes me feel confident about this one. [wrong]

Leopard

We’ll get a release date for 10.5, I’m guessing sometime around March 1. [wrong]

The “Top Secret” features will be demonstrated. Developers will likely get a new seed with those features included. [wrong]

If ZFS is mentioned at all, it will likely be nothing more than a bullet point. A handful of people will cheer as if they just found religion.

Some iChat or wireless feature will be demonstrated with Phil Schiller. This is a lock. Everyone loves Phil Schiller. [right! x2]

Adobe

I was wrong about this at WWDC, but I think it’ll happen this time.

Either Adobe will demo CS3 on Intel during the Keynote or Quark will be invited onstage to show off XPress

[Nope, still wrong] Now, with the public Photoshop CS3 beta, I think there’s a very good chance Adobe will be onstage for a demo, showing CS2 on a G5 vs CS3 on one of the new 8-core Mac Pros. The Mac Pros will be, of course, silly-fast. Possibly a release date, probably April. Not much applause since everyone wants it yesterday. (I hope I’m wrong on this, Photoshop CS3 is very polished and very fast, we need inDesign.)

Airport and 802.11n

[Right: New Airport] [wrong, not a complete refresh] A complete refresh for the Airport product line bringing it up to 802.11n. Who doesn’t want more dependable wireless that’s 10 to 50 times faster? Apple’s been shipping 802.11n compatible hardware for a few months already and any potential success of the iTV thing will depend on better wireless internet. I wonder how they’ll handle upgrades for soldered on wireless like first-gen MacBook Pros?

The new Airports will be tightly integrated with iTV and may include a more direct gateway to the iTunes store. [wrong]

HD

The lack of a widely adopted HD disc format is hampering the transition to HD. A wedding videographer has to either invest in both authoring systems at huge cost or choose one; their customers would be risking locking their memories into what could be an obsolete format. The cost of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drives is still stupid-expensive, but I could see Apple pushing to get some HD disc players and burners into their hardware. Unless they’re just going to give up on the HD format wars altogether and push iTunes as the real HD successor to the DVD. It’s probably too early for that, more home connections need to be upgraded, or at least have the option of upgrading, before that can happen. Besides, people still want to be able to share their own movies. [wrong]

Expect some sort of HD option in iTunes because of iTV. [astonishingly wrong]

iTV (or whatever it’ll be called)

I’m confused as to why people aren’t talking about this more. Maybe, like me, it just doesn’t seem that exciting. Expect 802.11n networking [right]. Since everything Apple sells online is pumped through Akamai, the speculation about an integrated BitTorrent client seems silly (even ignoring the movie studio aneurysms) [right].

iLife

[Wrong] I’m not expecting any new applications, though we’ll probably see a move toward the iTunes interface styling for the whole suite. Maybe AVCHD support for iMovie (and everything else via Quicktime), but that might be dreaming. I just want movies to share like photos and play in iPhoto slideshows. I like the idea of using iPhoto as a visual memory manager for your whole life.

iWork

[Wrong] The addition of a spreadsheet application makes sense for iWork. Hopefully Apple will rethink that category in the same way they approached Pages and produce something which focuses on producing great looking charts and graphs. Think Secret’s iWork screenshot is sort of hilarious, partly because it’s so ridiculously simple, and partly because that’s what the application could very well look like. However, while everything could be handled through floating palettes, that screenshot just seems to plain to be functional.

Hardcore number crunchers won’t be leaving Excel, but some sort of network data integration along with a well-defined scripting interface could open up some interesting possibilities for working with tabular data in new ways.

[Wrong] If the opening of the keynote contains a lot of charts and graphs, then this product is a lock. After introducing iWork 07, Steve will point out that all charts in his presentation were created with the new tools. This is a good thing since the 3d charts in iWork 06 are usually ineffective at communicating data and horrible looking.

.Mac

[Wrong] Something has to be done about .Mac. The only reason I renewed this year was because I use the account for iChat and sharing household calendars and didn’t have time to transition those features to other services and options. At very least, .Mac should include a full QuickTime Pro license. Well over a third of all bad email addresses from Joe’s Filters users are mac.com addresses; people who were using .Mac and quit.

Displays

[Wrong] Probably new displays with integrated iSight cameras. There is the outside chance that the pixel density could be increased in anticipation of Leopard’s resolution independence.

Surprises

[Wrong] There is still a ton of demand for a small laptop to replace the 12″ PowerBook. Apple must know about this. I can’t see Apple releasing a computer without a DVD drive because the psychology of it becomes too cumbersome. So that probably tosses out the sub-notebook form factor. However, there’s quite a bit of air inside a MacBook Pro and using the smaller iPod sized hard drive might be a possibility.

[Right!] No tablets. Too small a market and they’re just not that fun to use.

Stevenf’s razor

Panic’s Steven Frank shares a strategy for evaluating Apple related rumors:

Does the rumor contain the phrase “stripped-down version of Mac OS X”? If so, the rumor is almost certainly false.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

After playing around with Beryl on Ubuntu, I started really wanting virtual desktops on my Mac. Beryl maps the workspace to a giant cube, which you can then grab and toss around. Windows can be dragged from one face of the cube to another, it’s intuitive and feels as natural as moving a stack of papers to the other side of my desk.

A while back I’d tried out Desktop Manager, but found it sort of clumsy. The most recent version had the same issues as before. VirtueDesktops, while far more polished, has many of the same issues.

I don’t like keyboard shortcuts for window stuff, I like to use the screen and mouse to move things around. Having to switch from a dragging operation to a keyboard operation and then back to dragging is just too many shifts of state. Window management on multiple desktops should use the same action model as multiple physical monitors.

By way of this comparative article from 2004, I found You Control: Desktops. Finally, someone got window management right. While that article seemed largely negative, I found YCD to be very polished and do nearly everything I was looking for. Window dragging between desktops just works. The popup pager is very well thought out and useful. Stability isn’t a problem. Unplugging my external monitor didn’t seem to cause any issues.

The only negatives I can come up with are:

• no list of hot-keys. They’re easy enough to set, but sometimes I forget what I’ve set and shortcuts don’t show in visual palettes
• No mouse-button binding options
• Price. YCD is expensive, especially considering 2/3 of the competition is free and Apple will be introducing Spaces in Leopard.

This may be going onto my system full time, however because of the price, I’m going to really measure how much this affects my productivity before buying.

Dragging windows between desktops is huge, I can’t imagine using virtual desktops without it. If Spaces doesn’t can’t do dragging, this app might live on in 10.5.

Apple upgraded the MacBook Pros this morning. (I had mentioned to several friends that I thought today would be the day FWIW) There are a lot of nice incremental improvements, especially the increased RAM capacity and the return of the FireWire800 port.

But, as is always the case with Apple’s revisions, people are finding something to complain about. The one I noticed first was the complaining about removal of 7200rpm drive options — the only HD choices are 4200 and 5400 rpms. (MacUser deleted a whiny post before I could comment on it)

This is silly and clinging to past paradigms. As drives get bigger, their data density increases. As there is more data per platter, that data can be read faster without moving the disk as far.
Furthermore, the MBP’s SATA interface is SATA-150. Since 4200rpm drives can mechanically transfer better than that, there’s basically no difference between rpms. Seek times look to be comparable with competing 7200rpm drives as well. These drives spin slower, but they are just as fast as the competition. This is pure engineering efficiency.

So let’s see some benchmarks before shedding any tears for the 7200rpm option. That these slower spinning drives use less power is also a positive. I’ve been looking for months to upgrade my MBP to 200GB but have yet to see the drives for sale at any stores I trust.

Back to the MacBook Pro, what does seem weird to me is the RAM configuration. Why 2GB+1Gb, and more importantly, why not 2GB+2GB? What breaks with 4GB? (I’m sure we’ll know soon enough after someone tries it out and posts what happened)

Update: Here’s the answer to the 3gb question, via John Gruber, who still owes me a shirt. Also see Ross Brown’s comment below for what happens when 4gb is installed.

Every once in a while, probably twice this month, my GUI locks up after pressing Command-Tab to bring up the Application Switcher. Everything on screen is stuck behind the switcher display, the mouse still works but nothing can be clicked.

Most infuriating is that the guts of the machine are working normally, I can SSH in and run any non-GUI app I want and everything works fine. I’ve tried working up the ladder of apps to kill (via SSH), but nothing I’ve found manages to restore the computer to working order. Except restarting by holding the power button (or the shutdown command via SSH).

Today the screen froze while iTunes was playing, iTunes finished the song it was playing then stopped. No Apple Events work (ie. osacript -e’tell application “Finder” to quit’)

At least two, maybe three other people are having this problem too; Matthew Conway, poster lazydog on MacRumors and Rich Collins (who’s having it much worse and is willing to pay $125 for a fix.)

The machine is in otherwise excellent health. Disks are regularly checked and permissions repaired (FWIW). Nothing unusual seems to be appearing in the logs and there isn’t anything particularly funky running on the machine. Since it’s so irregular, trying to recreate this in a second user account isn’t a realistic option.

This has happened a few times and I’m totally at a loss as to why. That people are seeing it on non-Intel hardware is reassuring that it’s not a hardware failure. Any ideas about how to fix/prevent this are welcomed. If you’re having this problem, please leave a comment.

More from Apple Discussions: Command-Tab freezes system (sporadically)

I deleted the com.apple.dock.plist file, here’s hoping that works.

Update: I seem to have a partially failing stick of RAM, which may or may not be related. It passes Apple’s Hardware Test, but the computer won’t boot if that chip is installed by itself, or in the lower slot (where it was before I discovered this?!), it boots and seems to run fine in the top slot. I installed a new chip this morning (Sept 21), no issues so far.

Following up on yet-another dot-mac-sucks post, TUAW posted something of a petition drive to improve the .Mac service.

I just got a notice about updating my credit card so my .Mac account can auto-renew next month, and I was already seriously thinking about letting it lapse. The timing must have been right, here’s the feedback I left at the .Mac feedback form:

> My membership is up next month and I’m considering not renewing. I’ve been a member since the beginning, but $100 just seems like a lot of money for what we’re getting, and I’m just not using that much of the service.

> There is some buzz online about dissatisfacton with the .Mac service, and I think it’s justified. I hope you will be introducing more features, and especially more value in the near future. .Mac just hasn’t lived up to its promise or kept pace with cheaper or free competitors.

> At very least, all .Mac subscribers should get a complimentary QT Pro license.

That last bit has been an ongoing pet peeve of mine since before OS X. Apple is legally prevented from giving away several of the codecs in Quicktime, but AFAIK, there’s nothing preventing QT Pro licenses from being bundled in with all sorts of other software. Since crippling QT brings down the user experience of an otherwise great Apple product, it is in Apple’s best interest to make it absurdly easy to get QT Pro licenses. Maybe that “whole package” thing Steve Jobs talked about at WWDC could finally include QT Pro too, but I feel confident is saying it won’t. It should, but it won’t.

A few friends recently asked about whether or not they should buy a new MacBook Pro or wait a little longer for whatever’s coming next.

My first reaction, conditioned on years of Mac use and purchasing, was, “of course you should wait, there’s likely to be a new chip in the MacBook Pros any day now!”

I think I was wrong. Moreover, I think that whole line of thinking is finished.

We already know what the next chip in the MacBook Pros will be: The Core 2 Duo, probably running at 2.4 and 2.67ghz. None of this is a surprise, it’s all published on Intel’s Processor Roadmap and related documents.

Intel sticks to their roadmap. The roadmap doesn’t show any Core2 Duo chips in laptops before 2007. Despite the rumors, I’ll be surprised to see anyone shipping Core2 Duo laptops in quantity before Halloween (the actual first shopping day of the holiday season). Of course this is all speculation and I may be wrong.

The next CPU Intel designs will not make the previous model obsolete. They work on the principle of incremental progress. Mac users aren’t conditioned to understand incremental progress. Consider:

* The PPC blew away the 68k
* G3s crushed PPCs
* G4s ran circles around G3s
* The G5 was so hot it needed liquid cooling (and was faster than the G4s).
* The first Intel MacBook Pros were 5-10 times faster than the previous PowerBooks.

That kind of repeated beating gets you some learnin’. Thankfully, the days of imminent obsolescence are likely over.

The Core2 Duo is not radically better than the Core Duo. It is incrementally better, in some areas more than others. Compare the charts in this Core 2 Duo vs. Core Duo article on AnandTech. While some application tests do show a 10-15% performance improvement, most reveal 3–5%. Gaming Performance is almost identical between the chips. Also remember that a 10% speedup is equivalent to 0.2ghz of processor speed, something that tends to happen anyway between product cycles or could improve if you learn how to overclock amd fx 6300.

> **The performance difference here is not enough to justify an upgrade if you’re a Core Duo owner**, but for a first time buyer if prices are the same, the Core 2 Duo is simply the right choice.

Some in the higher nerd-echelons have realized the “shortcomings” of the Core 2 Duo and are already lusting after Intel’s next CPU, the mythical Santa Rosa platform. Me? I’m going to stop stressing about processors and enjoy my MacBook Pro for a while without worrying that it will be obsolete tomorrow.

Software however, that’s a whole other story…

Hardware

• Mac Pro with Quad Processors, or at least 2x dual-cores Right!
• New case for Mac Pro, the G5 enclosure needed to be huge mostly for heat management, Intel’s chips won’t need enormous radiators like the G5s did. I’m feeling high-gloss black, maybe. Wrong.
• Intel XServes Right!
• The return of 64bit CPUs. Right!
• Price drop on Cinema Displays, possibly with some new features, most likely a camera. If resolution independence is included in Leopard, higher-resolution may be offered, but I don’t see how they could sell high-resolution displays without supporting scaled UI features in the OS. Perhaps an add-on to 10.4? If there’s a significant surface redesign to the Mac Pro, displays might be redone to match. Maybe dropping “cinema” from the name too. Right! and sort of Wrong. too.
• Possible updates to MacBook Pros. These might include the rumored switch to Core2 Duo chips (obvious, but when? I don’t think Jobs really wants to stand up in front of several thousand developers, ask them how many are now using Intel Macs, then tell them those machines are obsolete. Especially when most of those developers just spent a laptop on admission to WWDC.) Other changes might include a MacBook like drive replacement rejiggering, which I’d welcome, even though gutting a MacBook Pro isn’t nearly as bad as the 15” G4. Right!, basically.
• A new sub-notebook to replace the much-loved 12” PowerBook. It will be significantly pared down, causing much consternation from those wanting a 12” replacement and much joy from those wanting a sub-notebook. (This one is a longshot, but not totally implausible.) Wrong.
• Mac Pros with dual GPUs or paired video cards. Also a shift to NVidia, mostly to appease Intel after AMD bought ATI. (I’m convinced the ATI/AMD purchase will lead to only two hardware choices for PCs; Intel-Nvidia and AMD-ATI. Intel might as well just buy NVidia since ATI’s stuff will likely be optimized for AMD hardware.) Close. NVidia is in, but no paired GPU cards and ATI is still a build-to-order option.

Software

• Subversion becomes part of the base OS X install. If not the base install at least installed with XCode and the Developer tools. (I will be among those cheering this one) Right! it’s in there!
• Resolution Independent displays in OS X (I will immediately start running at 80%, just for the smaller menu bar) Wrong. not yet.
• iChat improvements, demo’ed with Phil Schiller. Right! Right!
• Quartz 2D Extreme will have been cleaned up, renamed and turned on by default. Close.
• Some sort of gaming initiative, to encourage and make game-development easier on Macs Wrong.  although you can learn how to install betfred for your mobile or tablet.  
• Color coding for mailboxes in Mail.app. Wrong. Notes and todos aren’t what I was hoping for.
• Significantly better video handling user experience in iTunes. Wrong.
• Some sort of network-collaborative document framework. Wrong.
• Garbage collection in Objective C. This was sort of leaked a while back. Right!

Nots

• No new iPod, wrong audience and not enough press. Right!
• Virtualization, I thought Apple might do it, but now I’m doubtful. Partly because of Parallels, partly because it kind of undermines the MacOS. (Brent thinks Apple might buy them) Wrong.
• QuickTime Pro license included with .Mac subscription. This will never happen, but it should. An alternative would be a free QT pro license with each iPod or after so many songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Wrong. no surprise.
• iTunes Music Store renamed to iTunes Store. Probably not at WWDC, but it will happen. Wrong.
• No iPhone. Not because of any technological hurdles, rather due to the bone-headedness of American wireless carriers. So yeah, this is totally fake. Right!

Misc.

• Either Adobe will demo CS3 on Intel during the Keynote or Quark will be invited onstage to show off XPress. Wrong. Wrong.
• Before the zillion derivitive cards were posted, I would have expected Jobs to pre-empt John Siracusa’s WWDC Keynote Bingo card if events had lined up. Imagine a slide that just said “Bingo” before something good, at which point the crowd, knowing what’s coming, would have gone completely nuts. But now that there are a bunch of variants, the fun is sort of gone. The most reliable “wins” in the original card would be diagonal up from “New kernel in Leopard”, and across from “‘New’ Finder in Leopard”, which just aren’t all that exciting. Wrong., Wrong., Wrong. One guy in front of me did have a card printed out, but no one yelled anything.
• TextMate will win some sort of Apple Design Award. Allan more than deserves it. Right! Go Allan!
• David Watanabe will not win an Apple Design Award. No matter how much he deserves one and how beautiful NewsFire is, David wrote Acquisition and Hell will freeze before he’s invited on stage by Apple. Still, I hope I’m wrong. Right!, unfortunately.

This is a mix of what I think we’ll see and what I’d really like to see, hopefully there will be some crossover. I meant to post this last week, but forgot to (life distractions aplenty). A few things were added after seeing the buzzkill banner this morning. I’ll update this post after the keynote to see how I did.