The iPhone is Great But What About The Rest?

Don’t sit there and deny it. Don’t tell me that the iPhone and AppleTV deal was enough for you because, in all honesty, it certainly wasn’t for me. Don’t tell me you weren’t waiting for Stevey J. to say his famous “oh, and one more thing” line, hopefully talking about Leopard, iLife or at least something!

In truth anything else mentioned at the keynote after or before the iPhone announcement would have been pretty much insignificant, including Leopard. Nothing could have topped it and considering the keynote lasted a good hour and 45 minutes, I dare say there wasn’t much time for anything else. Are we therefore in agreement that, slightly disappointed as we were, it wasn’t Steve Jobs’ fault? Okay, fair enough, it wasn’t his fault, but that doesn’t give me my fix on Leopard and iLife info, does it?

Although it’s anyone’s guess as to when the next keynote packed with this information will be, the chances are that it’s likely to take place in mid-April at the NAB2007 – the world’s largest electronic media show. How do I know this? Well, I don’t know for sure that Apple won’t offer a keynote any sooner, but taking a look at this page and Apple’s lovely booth number, it kind of speaks for itself.

So with all the stuff that’s gone on over the past week, what can we expect or at least speculate Apple to be announcing come April?

Leopard

Technically, Leopard should be released before this date, but it’s not like Apple to release an operating system without some big fancy party to celebrate it – the NAB2007 is the perfect venue for this. If you take a look at our very own Chris Howard’s rating announcement chart, you’ll see that this is likely to be the king of the show with a ‘Major’ rating. There’s not a lot more to say about Leopard at this point that we don’t already know, so I’m just going to offer a couple of links for those of you that haven’t quite got all the information you need yet.

• Official OS X Leopard webpage
• Wikipedia OS X Leopard entry
• Chris Howard’s article – What is Leopard Up Against in Vista?
• My article – What We Know & What We Can Expect

Now while we all, myself included, were questioning why Leopard didn’t make an appearance, I would like to say that Steve Jobs did say last year that Leopard wouldn’t be released until Spring of this year, which makes the NAB2007 even more likely a venue for its unveiling. All this talk about Apple releasing the operating system early is just assumptions based on Apple’s previous years of joyfully surprising us with an early release – it was the Mac community that got us wondering where the Leopard announcement was at Macworld, not Apple.

iLife ‘07 and iWork ‘07

It’s safe to presume that iLife ’07 will be released at the same time as Leopard as the two sort of go together hand in hand – if you think of Leopard as the Dad and iLife as its creative Child. There’s no saying what updates are going to take place in iLife ’07, but I’m guessing it will probably be usability features over anything, as we saw in the update from iLife ’05 to iLife ’06. Of course iLife ’06 did bring us iWeb so whether there’s a new application in the package to bump up the price is anyone’s guess.

The more certain rumour though is for iWork ’07 which was touted to be released this week during Macworld. At present iWork ’06 offers Pages 2 (a word processor) and Keynote 3 (a presentation package similar to MS Powerpoint), but as from about June last year we’ve been hearing reports of a spreadsheet style application to be included with iWork ’07 called Charts. The great thing about this is that it will supposedly support importing and exporting of Microsoft Excel documents – now if they could just offer .DOC support for Pages then I’d be a much happier iWork user. There’s not a lot else on this topic but ThinkSecret does have a nice little article on Charts, which is worth a read.

New iSight

This update rumour has no basis other than Apple now no longer sell iSight – I guess you could call it iSaw now. iSight featured 640 x 480 resolution with 24-bit color at 30 frames a second and in terms of today’s technological standards that’s rubbish, in fact, it’s abysmal. The camera itself did look nice though albeit a bit big, again by today’s standards. Whilst the iMac and MacBook ranges feature built in iSight cameras just above the screens it’s fair to say that an update is still needed. Now this is a tricky one for Apple. Do they release a new iSight camera with at least 2-mega pixel resolutions, or do they scrap that idea and just release iSight through their display line and computer line? The latter idea would obviously put older Mac users who don’t have built in iSight on their machines out of the frame. Of course, for arguments sake Apple could just release both an individual iSight camera and have the updated camera in their display line and computer line.

New displays

I’ve always seen the displays Apple sell as over-priced although they are of high quality – because of this I just instantly associated the displays with MacPro users as no screen is included with those machines. Of course, Apple’s line of displays are suitable for MacMini’s or even PC’s, so why not revamp them a little bit to appeal to a wider market?

The first thing Apple would need to do is lower the price of these beasts a little, or at least offer a smaller/cheaper version for home users like you or I. Now this update would maybe coincide with the update I mentioned above – built in iSight cameras. I personally don’t think business or professional users would make much use of a built in camera on their display, other than to take a snapshot of a someone who has just stolen your display, of course – okay that wouldn’t really work unless it was an iMac or MacBook.

HDTV

There’s now no denying that Apple have entered into the media market, especially with their recent name change from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple, Inc. Apple TV is Apple’s answer to streaming content from your computer to your T.V, so wouldn’t it be nice if Apple began offering Apple branded HDTV’s? After all, I think it’s now fair to say that with their computer line being out-numbered by their media and communications line (Mac verses iPod, AppleTV, iPhone), Apple are competing more with the likes of Sony than they are with Microsoft or Dell.

And 2007 is apparently the year to buy a HDTV, with parts becoming all the more cheaper and HDTV’s becoming the ‘norm’ in the T.V department – I’ve certainly not seen the old CRT T’V’s for sale in a long time now, and all the new flat screen TV’s that come out appear to only be in High Definition.

Now that Apple are no longer just a computer company, there could be a number of different routes they could take, including HD-DVD players, so perhaps the last assumption on my list of what could be announced by Apple in April, if ever, is a bit much.

What do you expect Apple to announce at their next keynote, whenever that may be? And could you see Apple entering the HDTV market?