Bryan Bartow

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It's time for the obligatory "predictions-on-the-eve-of-a-big-Apple-event" post. Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference gets started tomorrow morning and the interwebs has been buzzing for some time now about Steve Job's keynote to kick things off. Rumors have been flying furiously for weeks now about a new iPhone with 3G capabilities to complement the new iPhone 2.0 software already unveiled in March. All of the usual suspects have weighed in with their predictions; some more aggressive than others. Here are my predictions for tomorrow's big event:

3G iPhone: Although most "experts" seem to think this is a foregone conclusion, I can actually envision a reality where SJ does not give us new iPhone. For some reason, I just have this feeling that it's not going to happen. However, where there's smoke there's fire and there's an awful lot of smoke on this one. If I had to bet my house on it, I'd say it will happen, but I won't be surprised at all if it doesn't.

Mac OS X 10.6 Preview: Several stories popped up in the last couple weeks about the possible unveiling of Leopard's successor. Early reports indicated that no new features would be included, but rather that it would focus on optimization and drop PowerPC support. I think this sounds pretty plausible, but I'm going to do the rumor mill one better: I think Apple will announce that they're taking Darwin—the open source core of OS X—to the next level. When I say next level I mean run on generic X86 hardware. I'm not saying that they're going to start selling OS X for any old PC, but I think they've seen enough interest from the "scene" to be willing to meet half way. This one is crazy and has no chance of happening, but if it does you heard it here first.

.Mac Refresh: This really needs to happen if not tomorrow then as soon as humanly possible. Over the air syncing for iPhones should be the absolute minimum update to the service. If not, subscribers are going to drop .Mac really fast. I'd love to see a whole lot more, but, frankly, the service has never gotten the full attention of Apple at any time during its life and I'm afraid that's not going to change...yet. Hope I'm wrong on this one.

Mystery Device: Isn't this a rumor before every Stevenote? Uber-portable Macs have been predicted for almost as long as I've been alive. While I can see a hardware refresh or two, I can't see a completely new device announcement tomorrow; not at WWDC. Now, Macworld in January is a different story...