WWDC Fever
With only a few days shy of opening day for WWDC, a lot of Apple fans are in feverish anticipation. While the WWDC is aimed at developers even the non-developers are excited. Why? Apple uses events like this to announce and preview products.
WWDC 2005 was focused on the transition to Intel processors. No new products were really announced. However the transition was as big a news as they come. Some of the highlights of the keynote were:
- Introduction of Podcast Directory
- iTunes update
- Announcement of Intel transition
- Steve Jobs reveals that OS X has been leading a double life. It has been compiled to run on Intel processors
- Talks by people from Wolfram Research, Microsoft, Adobe and Intel
You can watch the entire keynote presentation here.
Now what will 2006 bring? Will it be again more of developer news sans new products? I don’t think so. One thing’s for sure, Leopard will be previewed. That’s no secret as it is stated in the WWDC 2006 homepage.
I’m thinking that the new Mac Pros (replacement for the Powermac G5) will be announced. Core 2 Duo anyone? I’m also thinking that an update to the MacBook Pros will be unveiled. For this one I’m seeing some minor cosmetic upgrades, maybe a magnetic latch same as the Macbooks and the new Merom processor powering it. As well as some other new products. At first I was leaning towards predicting that new iPods will be announced. I’m however retracting that. I don’t think new iPods will be announced. They’re more for consumers and I think Apple will unveil them in a separate event. Whatever products will be announced this WWDC they will all have something to do with developers and pro users. Not so much for consumers.
Macrumors has an article with their predictions. I basically agree with what they’re saying. See, even they aren’t saying that iPods will be launched. Mostly products geared towards developers.
There’s also an interesting article from DVD Newsroom where they apparently have a contact high-up at Apple. Their article is a transcript from a phone conversation. If this is true, this is close to what I believe.
One thing I’m particularly interested in their conversation is the mention of Apple really focusing on iChat and pushing it in the near future. Recently I got an iSight and have been trying out iChat’s multi-way video chats and I must say it’s terrific. I wasn’t a big fan of video chats before but I think I’m slowly being swayed. I can’t wait to see what Apple comes up with. Now, iChat as a purely chatting software is miles behind messenger clients for Windows but it shines in the video chatting aspect. The quality I’m experiencing with iChat is far better than what I used to get with Windows based instant messaging clients. So I’m really interested in what Apple does to improve this.
So that’s my thoughts on WWDC. Too bad I won’t be able to monitor it live via the net and see what’s coming up. I’ll be at the hospital for a scheduled infusion. Wish me luck.
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POSTED IN: Commentaries, Juan's Posts, Leopard, Mac OS X, Rumors
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