Macworld Expo: Apple Keynote Predictions

The latest iteration of Steve Jobs’ famous Macworld Expo keynote will take place Tuesday morning in San Francisco. I won’t be there; after four days spent shoveling snow followed by four days in Las Vegas, I’ve decided to give my body a break so I’ll be monitoring the goings-on from a few hours’ drive away (which will be an interesting experiment, given that my coverage tends to focus on analysis and big-picture trends, versus breaking news…do I really need to be at a conference to adequately cover a conference?).

What will (and won’t) Jobs unveil this time? Of course I have some ideas, and this year I’ve decided to commit them to cyber-paper three days in advance. Feel free to stop by Brian’s Brain on Tuesday afternoon to cheer or jeer me (or both), depending on the degree of my prognostication success. And for now, let me know your thoughts on my forecasts below, as well as your own predictions.

An Ultra-Thin Laptop

I got a very interesting voicemail message yesterday (Friday) afternoon, which I was unfortunately unable to return prior to end-of-day, from the PR representative for a solid-state HDD manufacturer. This person alluded to a ‘big partnership announcement’ (probable translation: Apple) pending on Monday, which the Wall Street Journal (probable translation: Walt Mossberg, Apple’s second-biggest press fanboy after Tom Yager) will be breaking on Monday morning. I strongly suspect that this is validation of the optical drive-less (albeit externally tetherable) ultra-slim portable PC (probably based on the just-introduced Intel Penryn processor) that’s been churning in the rumour mill for weeks now.

An SSD would be ideal for such a system, for a number of reasons:

1. First and foremost, potential customers’ capacity expectations for an ultra-thin laptop would be less than with a more mainstream MacBook or MacBook Pro system, in part because the alternative magnetic HDD would come in an inherently lower capacity 1.8" form factor. The cost/GByte differential between flash memory and rotating magnetic storage accelerates as the number of GBytes increases, as I’ve written about many times before, so keeping capacity down plays to a SSD’s favour.
2. Review my recent feature article on the topic, and you’ll be reminded in detail of the inherent advantages of a SSD over a magnetic HDD: ruggedness and reliability, power consumption, performance (in some usage cases and with some SSD designs, not in/with others), and operating noise. All are particularly attractive attributes in a thin-and-light (therefore small-battery) system configuration.
3. Unlike a hybrid HDD, a SSD is fully command set-compatible with a magnetic HDD and is therefore O/S-agnostic. This characteristic is ideal for rapid adoption with a Unix-heritage operating system (although Apple could certainly add hybrid HDD hooks to OS X and to systems’ EFI over time), as well as for running Windows XP (which doesn’t have hybrid HDD hooks) and Windows Vista (whose hybrid HDD support is immature) via Boot Camp.

An iPhone SDK, along with (potentially) a supportive iPhone firmware release

This one’s intuitively obvious. Apple needs a SDK to address the hacker community’s (as well as businesses’) understandable enthusiasm to develop third-party applications for the device, as well as to encourage users to keep up to date with firmware releases from both security-fix and added-capability standpoints (I’m still running firmware v1.1.1 on my iPhone, for example, precisely because of AppSnapp and Installer.app).

Movie Rentals

Rumours about this have also been swirling for weeks, accompanied by tantalizing clues within iTunes’ and supportive devices’ binaries. This one’s another no-brainer, although I wonder if accomplishing it will require an upgrade of the notoriously (or, depending on your perspective, wonderfully) lax DRM in the current version of FairPlay. As I’ve editorially suggested any number of times already, most folks (with the possible exception of parents whose kids want to watch the same Disney flick over and over and over) are far more interested in renting movies for short-time viewing than in outright buying them. And unlike with subscription music, the movie rental paradigm is already well established in consumers’ minds; so much so that its absence in iTunes is viewed as a detriment.

iPod-Tailored Movie Versions On DVD

This one’s also likely, in part because a precedent already exists. In late November, Fox began selling a version of the latest Die Hard DVD with a Windows Media Video-encoded (and Windows Media DRM’d) version of the film on the DVD, intended for PlaysForSure-compliant device playback. I tried a copy, and it worked well. It’s also appealing to Apple because it shifts the distribution burden away from the company’s servers (and their costly bandwidth to the outside world) and towards the studios’ plastic discs. My big question about this particular topic isn’t if Apple and its movie studio partners will pull the trigger, but how they’ll implement it.

As I mentioned above, the current version of FairPlay is incredibly easy to circumvent. Apple could upgrade FairPlay (and regardless, will update the iTunes client), but that’d force the millions of owners of video playback-capable iPods and other gadgets (don’t forget about Apple TV!) to do a mandatory firmware uprev before being able to watch iPod-encoded material; feasible, but somewhat painful. And going Apple-centric from a DRM-and-codec-and-wrapper standpoint so would prevent the studios from tapping into the substantial (albeith not iPod-sized) PlaysForSure (and Zune…since Zune DRM-encoded material is backwards-compatible with PlaysForSure devices) hardware ecosystem.

Alternatively, the studios could insist on the proven (albeit hacked-several-times, but subsequently patched) Windows DRM for distribution, in which case Apple could execute a DRM- and codec-transcode within the iTunes client. This, however, is risky business, because anything running on a client computer is potentially hackeable. Might we finally see use of the TPM module that’s been shipping on Macs since the beginning of the Intel CPU transition?

Blu-ray Support

Another very likely move, especially coming on the heels of Warner’s recent allegiance shift. Apple first pledged its support for Blu-ray during a Sony-inclusive Steve Jobs keynote several years ago, although ironically DVD Studio Pro supported HD DVD image creation first (and has for almost three years now). Expect various hardware upgrades that embed Blu-ray drives, as well as (potentially) Apple-branded USB2- and/or 1394-tethered external drives to function-upgrade existing systems.

An Apple TV Upgrade

I don’t particularly expect new Apple TV hardware, but what I do expect is a substantial function upgrade to the existing hardware. Apple TV offers an abundance of hardware riches that’s left substantially untapped by the existing device firmware and service feeding it:

1. A fairly powerful Intel CPU, coupled to an equally hefty Nvidia GPU
2. A decent dollop of DRAM, along with several HDD capacity options
3. Network connectivity, currently restricted only to the LAN for file interchange with Macs and PCs running iTunes, but certainly capable of WAN taps as well.
4. The ability (thanks in no small part to the Nvidia GPU) to decode high-def video content, along with HDMI and component video output options…hampered by the fact that almost all of the material currently available in the iTunes Store is only 480-line standard-def.

In addition to the earlier-mentioned video rental and rip-from-DVD support, I hope that Apple also adds the ability to directly download content from the iTunes Store to Apple TV, much as the Xbox 360 can do today via the Xbox Video Marketplace (and, I suspect, the PS3 will someday also be able to do with full movies, not just today’s trailers). And speaking of the Xbox Movie Marketplace, I suspect that Apple will also finally roll out high-def versions of movies available for rent and purchase via the iTunes Store, with higher price tags commensurate both with their higher perceived value and their higher storage and transfer-to-customer costs versus today’s 480p variants.

I don’t see an Apple TV upgrade with an embedded optical drive, however. Apple wants to keep the Apple TV and Mac mini as clearly separate product lines, and this move would blur the feature set and price tag distinctions.

Other Possibilities

1. Penryn upgrades to other portions of the Mac product line, possibly commensurate with cosmetics updates such as the one the iMac recently underwent. The MacBook Pro is a particularly likely candidate, especially given that the Mac Pro and Xserve already got updated this past week.
2. New Cinema LCDs, likely with LED backlights
3. Higher-capacity iPhones and/or iPod Touches. However, I don’t expect a formal unveiling of the UMTS-capable (i.e. 3G) version of the iPhone which an AT&T executive pre-announced last fall. I don’t think it’s ready to go yet, and the last thing Jobs wants to do is Osborne his existing iPhone product line.
4. The release of OS 10.5.2
5. A WiMAX embrace within the portable product line?

And Script Guarantees:

1. Steve Jobs will say ‘boom’ at least once during his pitch, and
2. There will be at least ‘one more thing’

Monday AM followup: I just heard back from STEC, and the partner is EMC, not Apple. I’m therefore (slightly) less confident than I was before about an ultra-thin laptop unveiling. The SSD correlation was suspicious anyway, given that the Wall Street Journal writeup was going to break one day ahead of the keynote, and that STEC is a fairly small player (albeit a particularly high-performance player) in the SSD market.

The thin-and-light segment of the notebook PC business is quite small in size, albeit one that’s a particular favourite of a thin-and-light, small-in-size guy like me. Given Apple’s sub-10% share of the overall computer business (which is disproportionally higher, admittedly, in the notebook PC segment) an ultra-thin system would represent a fiscal and resource gamble for Apple. On the other hand, Apple is known for taking calculated risks, and an ultra-thin system would be right in line with Apple’s historical focus on design elegance and uniqueness, so we’ll just have to see what happens at the keynote in a day-and-a-few hours.