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5 Predictions for Apple in 2007
Michael writes "2006 is coming to a close, and all anyone can think about (in regards to Apple, at least) is the upcoming Apple phone, but what happens next? What are we going to be salivating over and speculating about after Macworld? What changes are in store for Apple in 2007? No one knows for sure, but it sure is fun to take a guess."
Apple already did number 1, it was called "iTV" at WWDC. (You said "announce plans" and that's exactly what they did.)
How about this one: In the wake of an accounting scandal, Apple is found guilty corporately of fraud and is broken-up into an Computer Systems company and a media delivery company. It'd be ironic that after all these years Apple got broken for shady business practices before you-know-who.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Apple has a major stock scandal brewing. You'll probably be reading a lot more about their legal woes than their products next year.
I do strongly feel this may well describe the future state of the Macintosh in general. Look at sites like Mac Gamer, and you'll see a steady decline in the updates to these sites since the Intel Macs went mainstream. It almost seems like the Mac game developers/porters have thrown in the towel and have acknowledged that the majority of their previous customer base would rather install Windows on their shiny new Macs, rather than wait the usual six months for them to produce a native Mac OS X port.
If gaming on the Mac has eroded to this lowly state, it can't be long until other markets are affected too. Developers of several popular multimedia/graphics/productivity tools that have maintained multiple code bases over the years may finally decide to kill off their Mac versions to cut costs, once armed with the knowledge that the average Mac user can simply be coerced into buying a copy of Windows and installing it via a Bootcamp-like utility. Before long, Apple may well have to break down and start to officially sell Macs with Windows pre-installed to remain competative in the PC market.
Eventually, being a "Mac user" could mean little more than "someone who uses the Mac OS for file management, internet activity and itunes, and uses Windows for everything else". Granted the integration may be tighter between the two OSes, but it'll still end up with Mac users paying royalties to Microsoft in the end... either for Windows, or the necessary APIs needed to ensure complete compatibility.
In a few years, Apple will be as generic a name brand as IBM, Dell or HP.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Its getting harder and harder to innovate in consumer electronics, and to have your product noticed. I have trouble thinking of Apple coming up with something as ubiquitous as the ipod in the near future.
Frm the article:
"I expect to see Parallels fully integrated into Leopard by the time the OS is released, giving us the first OS in history (to my knowledge anyway) that will allow us to seamlessly run our Windows, Mac, and even Linux programs from the same desktop."
This would be a user experience and customer support nightmare for Apple.
Not to mention it would be incredibly risky for Apple to acquire and bolt on a complex 3rd party application at this late stage in Leopard development.
The author of this article is clueless. Which isn't surprising, considering it is essentially a blog post on a mac fan site. He's just regurgitating rumours from Mac community forums in order to get page hits.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
2. ITMS and the iPod will be targeted heavily by Microsoft. Eventually the iPod will be replaced just as sony list the Walkman/Discman fame of the 80s and 90s.
.mp3 replaced the cd. apple was late to the mp3 player party, and the first ipods weren't even that good. but when they finally got a great product, it took over the market. as long as .mp3 is the preferred format, the ipod will always be successful. microsoft is determined to make their .wmv (or whatever it is) the standard and they are too focused on implementing their own special brand of DRM. ITMS is so popular because it "just works". and of course it does, ITMS, iTunes, and the ipod all come from the same people. microsoft will have to have their own store, their own program, and their own player. that will take a few years to get mind as well as market share. and even then, their size can't help them like it did in the office suite market. I think apple's biggest concern is not microsoft but current ipod users not upgrading.
it wasn't so much the ipod replaced the walkman, but the
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Yes, I know that Zune's wifi isn't real, but "has wireless" is a checkbox that ipod cannot currently check.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
........any cracks in the Apple empire are sure to be more and more exploited by a press hungry for material...I must admit to being pretty amazed to see the Apple stock option headline marked in red on the Drudge Report for three days running. As they say, no press is bad press, especially on the eve of some very highly anticipated product releases. Go Apple
I know nobody cares about my predictions, especially since they're about to end up at the bottom of the thread, but here are a few anyway:
Eight Core Mac Pro- just so Apple can advertise the most powerful personal computer EVAR
New Cinema Displays with built in iSight, IR sensor, HDCP. 23" becomes 24", firewire hub goes away. Maybe a smaller one
New keyboard, with USB2.0 ports built into it (three years too late)
.Mac will morph into some kind of social networking thing. Myspace for Mac users. It should, but won't, be free
Windows versions of Safari and iChat A/V, which no one will use because they both kinda suck
Apple needs a mid-tower computer between the mini and the Pro. The iMac doesn't cut it. Steve's cube fetish will resurface here
A tablet Macbook would be great, as long as the voice and handwriting recognition work better than anything before
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
however, by integrating in parallels developers could now decided to write ONE version of their software (windows) and be done with it
Which is precisely why there will always be obstacles to running Windows under OS X. I don't see Apple providing a Wine port, nor virtualization in Leopard. Can't have dedicated Mac Developers abandon coding under Cocoa and Carbon and let OS X die on the vine. The farthest Apple will go is to maybe provide a little "special" help to Parallels in the form of providing access to OS X engineers, but that's about it. They want -no- they NEED it to be inconvenient to run Windows on a Mac. An $80 charge before you can pirate windows onto your box is a pretty good level of inconvenience. $80 + a retail Windows license...even more convenient.
Oh wait, didn't we just have a bazillion threads about the Vista EULA forbidding users to run it under a VM. Why is that? Seriously, the answer is because it significantly simplifies any efforts to bypass the DRM technology in Vista. Just like Napster, Apple would find themselves behind contributory copyright infringement suits as soon as they provide virtualization tech and it is used to bypass DRM on HD or BluRay DVDs. So, this is reason #2 why Apple won't be selling bundled virtualization. "But that wouldn't make any sense to file a suit like that" you might say, to which I would have to reply "When has the MPAA ever been logical about filing lawsuits?".
cat
Apple is an integration company. The product they sell is user experience.
cat
Heh, that's funny. There are lots of things to criticise about Apple, but they absolutely don't "just throw [latest gadget] into a product as a checkbox filler." One of the main criticism of iPods is that "they don't contain feature X found in many other mp3 players." Compared to players from Creative or even to the Zune, the iPod is underfeatured. That's because unless the feature makes some kind of sense and can be integrated into the "iPod experience" in a moderately non-confusing way, Apple won't do it.
Can you give me anything about the iPod that's actually innovative, rather than "Same as competitor's product but looks sexier".Uhm... That's an entirely different question. Did Apple introduce anything new with the iPod? In a way, no. They took features away compared to other MP3 players, which is what grandparent was saying: Apple doesn't just throwin features left and right. What they did was make the iPod easy and efficient to use (especially compared to other players at the time).
So... you're not even contradicting what grandparent has said. You have a valid point (the iPod's features aren't that innovative), but it actually agrees with grandparent's point (Apple doesn't just add the latest fancy feature to the iPod whenever it gets the chance), as far as I can tell.
7. Apple will license OS.X to generic PC manufacturers starting with Dull^W Dell.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Well, World Of Warcraft is available on the Mac. It's quite disturbing how many people want that and nothing else anyway.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Just a quick list of things the iPod did first in an MP3 player:
1. the smaller, more expensive drives
2. touch wheel
3. click wheel
4. database frontend
5. an annoying hardware dock
6. shipping earbuds that aren't terrible
7. non-replacable batteries in an integrated form factor
8. No stop button (?)
9. No screen
10. Companion music store
11. DRM
12. Random-only play
13. Podcasting
14. Prioritizing physical size over storage space
They're like The Matrix. Revolutionary when it came out, copied to the point of being trite now. But Apple has done some very original things with the line throughout the years, and should be recognized for such.
The ______ Agenda