New Macbook Pro - AppleInsider pics

This blog has been predicting a Macbook Air-style facelift for the Macbook Pro line for some time now, and the chances of that just got a little more likely today with the publication of these spy shots from Apple Insider, which appear to show the new outer aluminum enclosure of something that looks like a 15” Macbook Pro, but with the more rounded styling of a Macbook Air case. Indeed, from the look of these spy shots, Mac Predictions mockups are looking pretty prescient.

Previous Macbook posts:

• Entire MacBook lineup (13.3”, 15” and 17”) to get Air-styling [Mockup]
  
• Second Generation Penryn Macbook Pro with new enclosure [Mockup]
  
• MacBook Pro updates may reflect MacBook Air design style (mockup)
  

3G iPhone

From time to time, the Apple rumor community gets the bit between its teeth and starts to pull. Often, everyone pulls in different directions, but sometimes all the pundits pull together, and then we must pay strict attention. Now is one of those times. There is an emerging consensus building that on June 10, at WWDC, Apple will launch a thicker, plasticky 3G iPhone, alongside the existing model. The new phone would have two cameras, one on the front, and one on the back, and GPS. Trouble is, MacPredictions doesn’t believe a word of it, and here’s why.

All metal enclosure
We’ve seen some pretty unlikely “spy” shots of the supposed 3G iPhone, with claims that the beautiful metal rear of the current iPhone will be replaced with an all plastic enclosure. This seems unlikely when you consider how, less than 12 months ago, Jobs launched the 2007 range of iPods proudly boasting that they now have all-metal enclosures. The iPod touch, for example, has a similar form factor to the iPhone, except that it has a metal bezel, rather than the mirrored-plastic one on the iPhone. Apple’s current design trends are moving away from plastic enclosures, not towards them. I expect the new iPhone to look like a slightly thicker iPod touch, with a black or silver metal bezel, and less plastic.

One model, not a range
As Leander Kahney explains so well in his excellent new book “Inside Steve’s Brain,” one of Job’s many successful initiatives upon his return to Apple was a drastic rationalization of Apple’s disparate product lines. Apple will avoid fracturing the iPhone product line unless there’s a very good reason to do so - and after all, why would or should anyone buy the Edge iPhone when there’s a better 3G alternative? Besides which, the fact that supplies of iPhones appear to be dwindling globally should put pay to this rumor anyway, and raise questions about any sources that suggested the old iPhone would be sold alongside the new 3G model.

Not locked to a single network
This is one of the few rumors doing the rounds that MacPredictions does believe, and we’ve been predicting such a move for several months now. The fact is that the exclusive operator deals have been unnecessarily limiting demand for the iPhone, at a time in the product life cycle where Apple should be going for global domination. Whilst Apple is likely to continue to have exclusive network partners in each territory, it will probably move to distributing a “sim free” model. However, Apple may have some neat ideas up their sleeves to sweeten the with-contract deal, and continue to take their iPhone revenue on a subscription model (which appears to please their bean counters) - see next point.

Free .Mac services for iPhones sold on a contract
Whilst AT&T and Apple’s other network partners will doubtless not be pleased about the advent of a sim-free option, the introduction of a free .Mac account for iPhone contract customers is likely to sweeten the re-negotiated deal for them. The introduction of Exchange Push support is great for enterprise customers, but since RIM are now targeting consumers with their Blackberry devices, Apple will need to provide a consumer push service in order to remain competitive. The current rumors of push mail and calendar services from .Mac sounds entirely likely. It would be very appealing to Apple to get in on the service-provision act, alongside their network partners. Bundling .Mac would also provide an excellent platform from which to cross-sells Macs to iPhone owners. Who knows, perhaps Apple will also sell .Mac as a service to sim-free iPhone purchasers, including visual voicemail as part of .Mac where operators don’t support it.

One camera, not two. No GPS.
With every revolutionary Apple product announcement, there’s always an area of disappointment for some. Even with the announcement of the original iPhone, there was disappointment that it did not offer 3G. The reason for these disappointments is because Apple thinks about the entire product, rather than simply the list of features. They don’t add things just for the sake of it, or because it’s what their competitors are doing. Jobs is famous for saying that he’s as proud of what Apple hasn’t done as he is of what they have. So what will the disappointments be on the 3G iPhone? Firstly, I suspect that they’ll take a pass on GPS support - for two reasons. Firstly, they’ll want to save space and power consumption. Secondly, they’ll say that their amazing Skyhooks/GSM triangulation solution means they don’t need GPS. The other area for likely disappointment is video conferencing. A lot of rumor sites are claiming that the 3G iPhone will have a camera on the front for video conferencing. MacPredictions doubts this. Steve will say something like “a lot of our competitors have been doing this for a while, and we looked into it, and you know what? It turns out that no one uses it. People don’t want to do video conferencing on their phones. It’s great when you’re using iChat, sitting down in the privacy of your home with a beautiful big MacBook screen, but it’s not so great when you’re walking around with your phone.” Instead, Apple will hopefully choose to improve the existing camera - which badly needs focus, face recognition, higher resolution etc.

World’s thinnest 3G phone
Steve Jobs is not the kind of guy to get up on stage and say “oh yeah, we’ve finally got a 3G model - sorry it took us so long”. No. He’ll have some reason for why Apple waited. It’ll be to do with the size, heat and power consumption of the 3G chipset when they originally launched the iPhone. Technology has come a long way since then, and they’ve got some “awesome partner who has delivered a cutting edge solution working really closely with Apple’s engineers” (implying exclusivity on the chipset without actually saying it). The long and the short of it is that Apple will go for some eye-catching proposition for their 3G offering, like “the world’s thinnest 3G phone.” It may be even thinner than the original iPhone, and with an amazing battery life. And Job’s will round it off with something like: “we think you’ll agree it was worth the wait”.

So, for what it’s worth, that’s MacPredictions take on 3G iPhones. No mockups yet, but we’ll have them for you very soon. Stay tuned!

iPod Shuffle with Multi-Touch

OK, I confess. I’m bored with the current Apple rumor hegemony. Whilst I have to concede that everything is pointing towards a thick black plastic 3G iPhone, I don’t have to like it. (And for the record, those photos of the 3G iPhone doing the rounds have got to be fake - it’s hard to imagine Apple ever producing something so... well... Samsungy.)

So to take my mind off all things thick and plasticy, Mac Predictions has instead turned its attentions to the iPod Shuffle. It seems that the recent drop in price has done the trick in giving a boost to the Shuffle’s flagging sales, but at the obvious expense of Apple’s famously high margins.

There are, of course, two reasons why someone might choose a Shuffle - its price, and its size. For those who are not price sensitive, but are still drawn to the Shuffle’s diminutive form factor, there’s currently a gap in the market - especially since the new Nano has sneakily increased in size. This got Mac Predictions to thinking about what might be done to a Shuffle by adding a screen and Multi-Touch. At first this just seemed like a daft combination, until an idea so awsome, so simple, so... well, Appley, came along.

The screen is square shaped - perfect for album art, which is all it ever shows. The device is a little larger than the current shuffle, and it only has two buttons on the bottom - On/Off and Shuffle. Each time the Shuffle goes from one track to the next, it uses a neat “Push” transition (illustrated) to change album art. In shuffle mode, it transitions quickly between multiple album covers, moving in different directions to suggest shuffling. Swiping your finger from left to right across the screen cues the next track, and in the other direction it goes back to the previous track. Swiping your finger up and down controls the volume. Tapping on the screen toggles between pause and play. It’s that simple.

I love this idea so much - I hope that Apple is already working on it, or reads this blog and develops the idea, because I want to buy one!

Mac App Store

Last month, we published some speculation from MacPredictions reader Doug Best on the rumored forthcoming iPhone updates. His prediction of the introduction of a range of iPods with a thicker 3G model have subsequently been corroborated by a number of reliable rumor websites, so it seems like Doug is in the zone at the moment. Here below is another prediction from Doug - a logical and strategically sound idea for Apple to introduce an App Store for Mac along the same lines as the planned App Store for iPhone.

"The upcoming App Store for the iPhone is already seeing incredible interest, not only from developers large and small, but users eager to consume its goods, and investors watching to see how it unfolds; US venture capital firm Kliener Perkins Caufield & Byers, in fact, has unveiled a $100 million iPhone fund for developers. An incredibly rich ecosystem of software for Apple portable devices could be on the horizon.

An easy to access, easy to use online store for buying mobile software, where an individual developer's $5.95 application could theoretically get the same exposure as a Fortune 500 company - it's a model currently non-existent (despite efforts) for the Windows Mobile or RIM world. Could the App Store be the killer app for iPhone?

Apple thinks so. And so does Kleiner Perkins. And anyone who mulls it over for any period of time will probably come to the same conclusion. But what about an App Store for the desktop Macs?

Say what? An App Store for my iMac, Mac Pro, MacBook or Mac Mini? But I can already go to a brick and mortar and buy a box with a CD in it, or order it from Amazon, or often purchase and download directly from the distributor. What can Apple do to make it better?

Alot, Apple thinks. Let's talk through it:

They can bring all those titles together under one roof, make finding and buying them easier and prettier and more enjoyable then ever with Apple's legendary ease of use and interface expertise.

This also creates an incredible opportunity for smaller developers to get the kind of exposure they could only dream of otherwise; the public will find a wealth of software titles they may otherwise have never heard of; the OS X software universe continues to get bigger and better, everyone is happy.

Imagine being able to instantly search, browse, purchase and download almost any Mac software title out there. Of course, larger titles like games or Adobe CS3 may take hours to download, but Apple is planning on an option for those who don't want to wait or don't have broadband - make the purchase in App Store, go into an Apple Store (brick and mortar) and have it burned on disc right there and pick it up. In fact, from your iPhone/iPod Touch you could purchase half a dozen titles totaling several gigabytes, and then pick them up on DVD from an Apple Store. Or just browse the App Store from within an Apple Store while visiting and have it burned on disc to take with you. Secure mirrored servers will make it possible.

The savings in boxes, paper, and printing should make Greenpeace happy. And since Apple takes a small slice of eery sale, it's a handsome revenue generator for them.

Also, App Store can store purchase info and registration/serial numbers, and notify when updates are available. Buy a new iMac or have your laptop stolen. No problem, log onto App Store with your new Mac and re-download and install all your purchases.

Apple is also striving to make the online shopping experience more user-friendly. Imagine being able to "see" people online looking at the same products, and then ask them what they think or have they used it before, etc. Its a totally interactive shopping experience.

So long DVD, bye-bye Blu-Ray

Remember when the Apple dropped floppies and introduced USB on the original iMac? The launch of the MacBook Air could augur a similarly bold and radical move.

Mac Predictions thinks that the time might be right for Apple to drop optical drives from all their notebooks, in order to reduce volume, complexity and cost. The launch of the MacBook Air may just have been a start, to test the waters. Apple likes to be bleeding-edge with their design decisions. The original iMac was not just influential in its use of colorful transparent polycarbonates in consumer electronics - Apple’s abandonment of ADB in favor if the then new USB invigorated an entirely new category of USB peripherals, and the rest of the industry eventually followed. At the time, people scoffed that the iMac had no floppy drive, but what self respecting PC manufacturer ships machines with them today?

So it seems altogether plausible that Apple would be the first computer maker to kiss the optical drive goodbye. It would be a fitting coda to the resolution of the whole HDDVD/Blu-Ray nonsense, and what fun for Steve Jobs to present Sony with such a hollow victory!

Of course, it wouldn’t do any harm to sales of movie rentals and downloads on the iTunes Store either…

Entire MacBook lineup (13.3”, 15” and 17”) to get Air-styling [Mockup]

Mac Predictions has been saying for some time now that Apple is likely to redesign the MacBook Pro to follow the styling of the new MacBook Air. Apple Insider provided support for that view this week, citing a source that claims the entire MacBook line including the 13.3” MacBook will receive the new look, which reflects both the Air and the new iMac.

Whilst the 13.3” MacBook enclosure is not showing its age to the same extent as the MacBook Pro, it certainly feels like an Apple-style move to go for a bold revision of the entire line in one fell swoop. Here’s a speculative visual to see how that might look. As you can see, we’re guessing that the new MacBook and MacBook Pro will take their cues more from the Air than the iMac.

Apple Analysts and the 3G iPhone

Company	Analyst	Reason to believe	Time Frame	Details
Gartner	Ken Dulaney	"he has heard from Asian sources"	"As soon as possible"	Apple has ordered 10 million 3G iPhone with OLED displays
Citigroup	Rich Gardner	Overseas meetings with members of the Taiwanese PC and consumer electronics supply chain	April - June	"The enterprise smartphone market will, for the foreseeable future, be dominated by RIMM and Nokia."
UBS	Nicolas Gaudois	various checks, and particularly an HSDPA design win by Infineon	April - June	Apple may not intend to have EDGE-only options in future iPhones
Piper Jaffray	Gene Munster	Supply problems in NYC, discounts in Germany	May-July	3G model to be sold alongside 2G
Bank of America	Scott Craig	"Channel check"	June	3 million will be built in May, to be followed by another 8 million in the third quarter of the year
Current Analysis	Avi Greengart	Electronista	June	Coincide with the iPhone 2.0 firmware
American Technology Research	Shaw Wu	Checks with supply chain sources	Late June - Early July	The current "2.5G" iPhone could remain on the market, using a newer case
RBC Capital Markets	Mike Abramsky	Wall Street Journal	September - December

In our ongoing mission to keep an eye on analysts, we’ve put together this chart of the prognosticators, for a considered view on when we can expect the new 3G iPhone to emerge.

The majority verdict seems to point to some time in June, perhaps alongside the 2.0 Firmware launch… perhaps at WWDC. We still have one pessimist – last we read, Mike Abamsky at RBC was citing technical problems pointing to a delay until after the summer. If this turns out to be true, RBC gets extra kudos for standing out from the pack.

Another popular view that is emerging is that Apple will sell the existing Edge model alongside the new 3G model, although UBS’s predictions seem to contradict this view.

We’ll keep you posted as the analysts tell us more about how we should “think about” Apple, and give us “additional color” on developments. Or alternatively, if you struggle to tell your Gartners from your Garders, please feel free to just skip these analyst posts ;)

“Pixel Studio” - Apple-branded Photoshop Elements killer

Last month, this blog speculated that Apple might consider putting its savings to good use and purchasing Adobe. So far, they haven’t taken our advice on this one. So here’s an alternative strategy…

Isn’t it time that Apple developed their own image editing application? After all, they have Logic for audio, Final Cut Studio for video, but nothing for image editing. Sure, there’s Aperture, but this is more for organising digital photography, rather than editing images. We’re talking about a program that Web developers, print designers and desktop publishers would use. Yes, we’re talking about that elusive beast – a Photoshop competitor.

In the past, its been assumed that Apple wouldn’t dare to stray into this territory for fear of provoking Adobe into withdrawing Photoshop for Mac. But things are looking different these days. With the resurgence of the Mac platform, it looks unlikely that Adobe could afford to desert the platform. Instead, they seem to be heading in the opposite direction, by resurrecting apps such as Premiere for Mac to take on Final Cut Pro. We’ve also seen an emboldened Apple taking on Microsoft Office with iWork. Rather than driving Microsoft away from the Mac platform, competition from iWork seems if anything to have invigorated Microsoft’s Mac offering.

With Apple Insider reporting that Adobe plans to launch a 64 bit version of Photoshop CS4 for Windows, whilst leaving the Mac version at 32 bit, there’s all the more reason for Apple to consider offering Adobe some “coopertition” in this area. Apple could leverage their Mac-only technologies such as Core Image, Core Graphics and Core Animation – after all, a lot of the basic functionality for an image editing app is already built into these libraries. With a version 1.0 application, Apple could quickly give Photoshop Elements a run for its money. Subsequent versions could aim to take on Photoshop CS3 itself.

Whilst the most Apple-like name for this product would probably be “Image Studio”, this name is already taken by AutoDesk. So instead, Mac Predictions’ money is on “Pixel Studio.” But whatever it is called, we think it would be a hit – especially if Apple chose to price Version 1.0 aggressively, at say $79. As with early versions of iWork, customer curiosity alone would probably generate enough sales for the product to deliver profits whilst it approaches maturation.

Scrap the stars, Steve

OK, so this is not so much a prediction as it is a wish – a wish upon a star, if you will.

When I first saw Time Machine, demoed at WWDC ‘06, words failed me. I was truly astonished that Apple would come up with such a tasteless user interface concept. Don’t get me wrong, I think that representing the historic state of an application window in 3D space as a metaphor for tracking archived changes is truly inspired (albeit some alternative methods of navigating Time Machine wouldn’t go amiss). No, I have no problem with the basic premise of Time Machine – my problem was with the Star Trek-style background visuals. I haven’t seen a user interface concept that intrusive and inappropriate since Microsoft saw fit to introduce a cartoon dog into Window XP’s search functionality.

At WWDC ’06, I wrongly assumed that since it was a sneak preview, the concept would be refined before final release and the stars would be toned down at the very least. Far from it. Instead, Apple saw fit to really go to town with the whole Star Trek motif. Not only is it on the Mac OS X product packaging, it’s even the default desktop pattern. That may not be such a big deal for Windows users, who are quite used to their default desktop “wallpaper” being polluted with intrusive marketing messages, but Apple used to have a tasteful default desktop image – so much so that I always used to stick to it.

As if the stars in themselves weren’t enough, Apple saw fit to include a gaudy pink nebulae – which oddly highlights the problem that MacBook Pros have with displaying millions of colours (check out that banding!)

The trekkies at Apple have come a long way from Time Machine and Leopard. Their work can now also be seen on marketing for Time Capsule and Final Cut Studio. There’s even a suggestion of a space theme on Apple TV (don’t even get me started on lens-flares). What happened to form following function; to Zen-like simplicity; to design being about how things work, not how things look? Please Steve, scrap the stars!

“iPod Air” multi-touch iPod Nano [Updated]

Do you recall the rhetorical flourish with which Apple launched the iPod Nano in 2005? Steve Jobs proudly announced that whilst the iPod mini was the best selling iPod in history, today they were going to replace it. In fact, they launched a smaller model with a new enclosure and a colour display. They “replaced” it in the sense that the new model had a new name – “nano” rather than “mini”. The fact that Apple would cold-bloodedly “replace” a best seller was held as an indication of the company’s relentless pace of innovation. Despite the rhetoric, the Nano was indeed a remarkable breakthrough device, and it certainly upstaged Motorola’s Rokr handset, which was launched alongside it.

Over the following three years, Apple has consistently upgraded its iPod line in September, immediately prior to the holiday sales period. This is probably not indicative of a natural cadence in the pace of Apple’s innovation, but rather a marketing decision that holding back new iPod lines to launch for the holidays maximises hype around the product, and consequently maximises sales. Perhaps. But things are starting to look a little different now, with the economy weakening, and investors getting jittery. During the last economic downturn in the late nineties, Steve Jobs famously said that Apple’s strategy was to innovate its way out of the recession. And there’s no doubting the results that this strategy has achieved. Perhaps now is the time for a similarly bold move. One obvious candidate would be to bring a new iPod product to market now, rather than waiting for the holiday buying season. Whilst such a move may sacrifice some holiday buzz later in the year, it would be preferable to making price cuts to stimulate sales – cuts that would undermine iPod’s price positioning longer term. It would also help to ensure that the iPod line does not lose its lustre, which could potentially lead to a loss in market share.

So, perhaps it’s time to boldly “replace” a best selling iPod line again. And what better candidate than the iPod Nano itself? Whilst the Nano has retained its name for three years now, the product itself has changed substantially. The Nano is now larger than before, with a bigger display and the ability to play video. However, this screen is still relatively small, and it seems doubtful that many Nano owners get much use out of video playback in practice – it’s more of a gimmick than a useful feature. So if the Nano line were to be replaced, what should its successor be? MacPredictions thinks that the answer is twofold: replace the clickwheel interface with a multi-touch display, and with the space saved from the clickwheel, make the screen larger for a better video viewing experience, whilst retaining the device’s overall dimensions. And the name? Of course… iPod Air.

So does multi-touch on the Nano successor imply the introduction of the iPhone OS? Not necessarily. The iPod Air would be too small to support many features of the iPhone OS, including the virtual keyboard and the 20 icon home screen. Given that text entry has never been very important on iPods (and was only recently added, with the introduction of search functionality) the iPod Air can probably do away with the keyboard in favour of a more basic character picker. The 20 icon home screen could be replaced with a 9 icon screen. But this does beg the question – does Apple really want to get into the territory of supporting multiple resolutions on the iPhone OS? Application developers for other mobile devices will know what a pain it is to develop different variants of their games and apps for different devices. The hegemony of Apple’s iPhone platform is one of the attractions of its newly launched SDK.

Whilst there are certainly drawbacks to introducing a second screen size to the iPhone OS line, the benefits are so substantial that MacPredictions believes Apple is likely to do it anyway. The physical dimensions of the iPhone and iPod Touch lines are limited by the physical requirements of the interface – the icons must be large enough to touch with one’s fingers. And yet, the iPhone is quite a large devise, and some customers will always prefer something smaller. The huge popularity of the Nano is also indicative of the appeal of smaller devices. So in order to roll multi-touch out across the entire product line, and in order to introduce the much anticipated “iPhone Nano” at some point, Apple will have no option but to develop a variant of the iPhone OS interface designed for smaller devices.

Update

Coincidentally enough, 9to5Mac published a story today entitled "iPod Air" pointing out that someone had registered the domain name ipodair.com. For a brief moment, it seemed like the whole MacBook Air thing was happening again, but sadly it turns out that Apple were not the registrants of the domain (even though it's currently re-directing to Apple's iTunes page). Previously, Arn from MacRumors registered the macbookair.com domain in advance of the svelte laptop's announcement. This triggered a defensive registration of similar domains by Apple. However, ipodair.com was registered in January, and Apple does not appear to have reacted by registering any variants. Perhaps they're just playing it cool for the time being.

Second Generation Penryn Macbook Pro with new enclosure [Mockup]

In February, this blog predicted that Apple would update its ageing MacBook Pro line with new enclosures following the slim, curvaceous form of the new MacBook Air. Later that month, Apple released a minor upgrade to the MacBook Pro's specs, but no new enclosure. Undeterred by this setback, MacPredictions continues to believe (based upon speculation, rather than any hard evidence) that Apple is likely to redesign its MacBook Pro enclosures this year. It's just not like Apple to have an inconsistent design style across one of their lines for very long. Remember, for example, when the PowerBook switched from the titanium enclosure to aluminium. First the 17" and 12" models were released. For a few months they were sold alongside the 15" titanium model, until eventually that too switched to the new aluminium enclosure. Apple's introduction of the Air may be indicative of a similar phased rollout.

DailyTech claimed in February that Apple would be updating the MacBook Pro line again in June to introduce new second generation Penryn processors. Perhaps then we'll see the entire line consolodating on the new air-style enclosures.

Apple iServe with iTunes Server [Mockup]

Earlier this month, at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs was asked about the possibility of an “XServe Mini” to bring Leopard Server-style services to consumers at an affordable price. AppleInsider reported that “Jobs seemed like he wanted to say something, but then punctuated the awkward silence with the typical refrain of not being able to say anything.” Why did Jobs hesitate? Perhaps because he had just such a product in mind.

For what it’s worth – here’s what MacPredictions thinks that it might be (all speculation, as usual, no inside sources).

As consumers are buying more and more content from the iTunes Store, storage is becoming an increasing issue. Put simply, sooner or later your Mac or PC will run out of disk space. And this problem is only going to get worse as consumers increasingly switch to HD content. A home server is the obvious solution, but there are some problems to address:

• It needs to be easy to setup and administrate
  
• It needs to be extendable – consumers storage requirements will continue to grow
  
• It needs to be resilient
  
• It needs to be affordable

The solution that MacPredictions envisages combines several products:

• AirPort Wireless Base Station
  
• Apple TV
  
• Time Capsule
  

So it would sit in your living room, under your TV, it would store all of your iTunes purchases, so you can watch or listen to all your content on your home entertainment system. It would provide a simple backup solution for all the Leopard-based Macs on your network. And it would serve internet access wirelessly to the entire household.

The final component would be a new software tool – iTunes Server, that would automatically sync content purchased from iTunes onto the server, and it would serve iTunes content seamlessly to all authorised clients on the network, as if the content was stored locally. It would enable the user to set rules to determine which content is synced to which clients, and it may even provide the ability to remotely manage Macs – so for example, parents could set the parental controls for their kid’s Mac.

The server would offer some RAID options, with the ability to dynamically add addition capacity to a single logical volume, with a neat hardware enclosure design enabling drives to be stacked in a tower configuration, without any hassle with cables.

Post-keynote depression

With the dust just beginning to settle after last week’s SDK keynote, a mood of despondency pervades the Apple rumour community. When will the next clue emerge for us to obsess over? Are we entering a dry spell? A harsh lent? With the Stevenote feast now over, must we now wait until WWDC for more? Hadn’t we all gotten so used to those weekly Tuesday announcements. Now we’re left with nothing but a Beta SDK and creative block. If we could just come up with the one mobile app to rule them all…

Desperation has risen to such a point that we must make a meal out of a story like this – but it’s thin gruel. Thin gruel.

SDK Announcement Summary

Available now:

• Beta iPhone SDK
  
• iPhone Developer Program
  
• iPhone Enterprise Beta Program
  

Available in "late June":

• iPhone 2.0 firmware update (free)
  
• iPod Touch 2.0 firmware update (price TBC)
  
• iTunes App Store
  
• Games, including Sega’s Super Monkey Ball and Electronic Art’s Spore
  

Apple has delivered exactly what they promised, albeit a week later than scheduled. The iPhone SDK is available today for free download from Apple.com (albeit their servers are currently struggling to cope with demand). Nonetheless, some iPhone fans will be disappointed that nothing new has been delivered for the end user today.

So let’s take a look at what today’s announcements reveal about the future of iPhone from the end user’s perspective. Firstly, we now know that that 2.0 firmware will be released in late June – whilst that doesn’t preclude any further incremental updates before June, it certainly makes them less likely.

Here’s what we know we can expect from June’s 2.0 update:

• iTunes App Store – enabling users to wirelessly download and install iPhone apps, which will then presumably be backed up on next sync. It will also be possible to purchase apps via iTunes on a Mac or PC
  
• New icon for iTunes WiFi Store - a small detail, but hey!
  
• PowerPoint attachment support – this is revealed in today’s press release
  
• Mass move and delete messages in Mail – also in today’s press release
  
• VPN support – could come in handy for techies and corporates alike
  
• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support – only interesting to companies that have Exchange servers
  

Presumably there will be more to the 2.0 update than that – we’re guessing that Apple is holding back some of the cool stuff for another Stevenote closer to the time. Strange though that during the SDK announcement, when Scott Forstall listed the features of the new “Cocoa Touch” application framework, he made no mention of a “File Picker” (i.e. Finder-style file browser) to go along with the “People Picker” and “Image Picker”. Hopefully this is a top-secret feature that’s been deliberately left out of the SDK beta just to tease us. Hopefully.

“Touch OS X” - Branding Apple’s Handheld OS [Picture]

With the launch of Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch SDK this week (albeit probably still in Beta), it’s surely time for the company to sort out the branding of its mobile OS. Currently, Apple refers to the system that iPhone and iPod Touch share as “OS X”, (sometimes mistakenly referred to by journalists as “Mac OS X”). And as anyone writing about Apple knows, it’s a real mouthful to keep referring to “iPhone and iPod Touch”. The problem will presumably only get worse as Apple releases even more products running their handheld OS – “iPhone, iPhone Nano, iPod Touch and iTablet” will hardly trip off the tongue. And software developers will need a snappy name to describe what their apps run on – not just a list of devices.

It therefore seems inescapable that Apple will need to review its mobile branding strategy, and our money is on “Touch OS X”. It seems like there’s no better time to make the switch than at this week’s forthcoming SDK Keynote. As usual, the mockups on this page are just for fun, and MacPredictions has no inside sources.

Forget Microsoft/Yahoo!, think Apple/Adobe

Apple has maintained a relentless pace of innovation over the past few years. Their management team are far from risk-averse, and yet they rarely seem to put a foot wrong (the Cube, Apple TV "Take One" and Sherlock are the only flops Mac Predictions can think of since Steve Jobs, return). As a consequence, their value has grown stratospherically (even allowing for the recent wobble in share price).

Compare Apple’s stellar performance with that of Adobe – a company that has plodded along, with a low innovation, risk adverse culture. They’ve been resting on their laurels for years, making a reasonable income by charging customers over and over again for essentially the same products. The only two highlights in the past decade were the launch of InDesign – a worthy competitor to QuarkXpress that has gained significant adoption – and the purchase of Macromedia, which is effectively an “if you can’t beat them, buy them” strategy.

Adobe’s performance is remarkably disappointing when you consider that they are one of the only companies that has ever been in a position to give Microsoft a run for their money. PDF is the only viable competitor to Microsoft’s Word document format. Flash could be a serious threat to Microsoft’s plans to make the web dependent on its own proprietary extensions and technologies. And Flash Video has been a surprise entrant into the media streaming sector, that has left the others standing, and today powers the mighty You Tube behemoth.

If Mac Predictions was an Adobe shareholder, we’d be asking the following questions:

• Why hasn’t Adobe leveraged their Flash product into an end-to-end web application development platform, that becomes a true threat to Microsoft’s .Net
• Why hasn’t Adobe leveraged their PDF platform to compete with Microsoft’s Office productivity suite?
• Where is the next Photoshop or InDesign coming from, and when?
• Why has Adobe failed to get into web services that extend their software expertise? Surely You Tube should have been an Adobe product. Web-based Photoshop seems too little too late, and why did Adobe Stock Photos fail?
• Why is it that Apple can run rings around Adobe in their heartland sector of creative professionals, with products like Final Cut Studio, when this isn’t even a core business for Apple?

It’s pretty obvious where this is all pointing. Bizarrely, some analysts and pundits are predicting that Apple may make a counter bid for Yahoo!. This is inconceivable. It’s hard to think of a company that offers Apple less synergy. A purchase of Adobe, however, would be a very smart move. Apple’s management team stand a much better chance of delivering value from Adobe’s IP than the existing management team seem able to do. When you consider the potential synergies of combining Apple technologies such as Mac, iPhone, QuickTime and iTunes with Flash and PDF, you get a to-do list so long, the challenge is working out where to start.

Adobe’s market cap was quoted by Yahoo! as $18.56 billion on market close, February 8th, 2008. That’s oddly close to the $18.4 billion figure that Apple was quoted to have as cash balance in closing Q1 2008. Could Apple be saving up for something?