Macworld 2008 Predictions

What's an Apple fan to do while waiting for Macworld Expo to arrive? Post their predictions of course, just like I did for WWDC.

• No tablet - I still don't see this happening.


• The heavily rumored ultraportable is just the return of the 12" PowerBook as a MacBook Pro. The 12" PowerBook is/was loved by those that have/had them. I'm really surprised we haven't seen it return already. I imagine they were waiting for a case redesign, which I do expect for the MacBook Pro. The existing MacBooks won't change much at all. I think a Blu-ray drive will be an option for them.


• The 12" MacBook Pro will not have an optical drive (but the other ones still will). This isn't the machine that you use to rip CDs and you'll just have to deal with not watching DVDs, unless you rip them or use the external drive. Treat yourself and buy a fresh movie over Wi-Fi while you wait for your plane to board.


• iTunes movie rentals. I'll guess $2.99 for 48 hours, but I would like to see a model similar to Netflix, without waiting for the post office. Pay $19 a month and have 3 movies out at any time. Return one and you get to download and watch something else. How cool would it be if Apple built in BitTorrent tech to save their bandwidth bill?


• New Cinema displays, hopefully at more competitive prices.


• We'll get iPhone SDK details and see demos of some apps in progress from some big names, although I can't really think of who.


• 16 GB iPhone at $499 pricepoint. No change in price on existing models


• Apple TV software update - I love my Apple TV but folks don't seem like they'll be happy until it dies a painful death. Apple is certainly going to give it one more wave of software at least. I doubt the hardware will change, even though I would like to see my Mac nano dream come true.


• Steve will tell us all about Leopard being the best OS X ever. Vista is flopping and folks are switching.

Those are my predictions. Feel free to mock me when I'm wrong.

WWDC Predictions

Monday's the day. Here's my predictions.

* It's a developer conference. You need to feed the developers. Widget support for Apple TV will be announced.
* 3rd party development for the iPhone will be announced. This will include widget support and a qualification program to get your app Made for iPhone.
* The widgets for the Apple TV and iPhone will be made with Dashcode. You'll be able to deploy your widget across most of the Apple product line. iPods will be excluded, at least until they release the iPhoneish iPod.
* .Mac will get an overhaul. Disk space will be greatly increased. I'd like to believe the Google apps tie-ins, but we'll have to see.
* There will NOT be a tablet Mac. The world still isn't ready for a tablet, no mater how hard Microsoft is trying to build that market. The recent flood of multi-touch gadgets will make the tablet computer far more palatable.
* There won't be much iPhone talk. It will get its own event.
* There will be backlash on Leopard features. It won't have everything everyone is expecting and they'll wonder why they are waiting until October to get it.

Overall, I'm not expecting any major wows. However, the iPhone has been a fantastic smoke screen (people won't stop talking about it) and Apple could be holding some surprises, but I really think the iPhone was an all hands on deck kind of product.

Hybrid iPods

I'm by no means the first to think of this idea, but the more and more I read about the hybrid hard drives, the more I think, hmm, could those work in an iPod? The idea is, you put the songs you think will be played in the flash and then you don't have to spin the hard drive. More on that in a sec.


For starters, this wouldn't work because the drives are physically too big. Right now, the drives I've read about only come in the 2.5 inch size, not the 1.8 size that the full size iPods use. It's only a matter of time before they get made in that size though, right?

Next, I wondered if the flash cache was big enough. Currently, they come with 512, or at most a gig. Is a gig enough? Ideally, you'd avoid the drive as much as you could and only play from the flash. If we assume a meg a minute, which is about right for 128 AACs or 192 MP3s, you'd get 1000 minutes or 16 and half hours of playback. That's more than a full run of the iPod's battery. This is starting to sound pretty good. If you could predictively populate the flash at sync time, when you have plenty of time and plenty of power, you skip the spinning drive and extend the battery life.

You'd get all of the benefits of a full iPod with the battery life of a nano. That would be cool.

So how would you fill the cache flash with the stuff you'd want, rather than the other 59 gigs of stuff you are carrying?
Well, iTunes could attempt some predictive algorithms to fill the flash, or perhaps they go the low tech route and just ask us. Just like the checkbox to "Play higher rated songs more often" in Party Shuffle, you could tick a box for flash-syncing the higher rated songs if you listen to those more often. Or, maybe you can designate a few playlists as flash-syncable because you know you listen to those the most. Combine that with smart playlists and you'd smart sync the right stuff a good portion of the time. I know I spend most of my time listening to a Not heard recently smart playlist that picks up any newly added content (including podcasts) along with the stuff I haven't listened to in months. This lets me get a nice mix of my new stuff while still keeping my whole library in rotation.

I wanted to see if you could do some predictive syncing and I also wanted to see how much music I listened to between syncs to see if this would work. I looked at my last 16 days of listening, which translates into 4-6 sessions. I'm defining a session as 3-4 days of playback. That's about how long a charge will last me and I need to do this because the last played times aren't the last synced times...unless you're using a shuffle which does set the last played at the time of sync.

I average about 3.5 hours of listening a day. Roll that up into a session and you have 10.5-14 hours which is less than the 16 hour figure from earlier. Still, that assumes a lot of positive hits coming out of the cache. Perhaps a 2 gig flash cache would work out better.

One last idea for those that like to shuffle. The set of tracks for the shuffle could be determined at sync time and populated in the flash. It would still be random, it just wouldn't be chosen at random at the time you were listening.