Predictions for WWDC '07

This June the center of the Mac universe will be at Moscone West in downtown San Francisco as developers and IT professionals from around the globe come together for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Technically-speaking WWDC 2007 should lack the glamour of Macworld! But, this is Apple we're talking about, and everything Apple does, under the stewardship of CEO Steve Jobs, is followed with great interest by developers, consumers, and the public at large!

Here are my predictions for next week:

*New iMacs and iPods (maybe delayed until Apple Expo Paris)
*iLife 07
*iWork 07
*iLife and iWork integrated into Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
*Boot Camp no longer requires reboot in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
*Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac release date announced
*Blu-Ray build-to-order (BTO) option available from Apple Store
*.Mac updated with Google co-branding and sans subscription

Lots of cool new applications and updates from third-party developers.

Snow White and the GeForce

This morning the third generation (3G) iMac was released at Apple Expo Paris 2004. Since the 1G iMac appeared in JLo's stylish video for 'If You Had My Love' (1999), the diminutive all-in-one solution has been at the vanguard of consumer style. The latest iteration of the successful iMac brand is a slender vision of silicon perfection.



I've owned both first and second generation iMacs and can't wait to see the latest model for myself. Apple should be applauded for producing a high quality product at a competitive price. Dropping the iMac logo from the front fascia is a natural progression, the Apple logo is elegantly subliminal.

As with previous consumer desktops, the only flies in the ointment are the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and RAM! This blemished beauty ships with the pitifully underpowered nVIDIA FX 5200 Ultra and 256MB RAM (at time of writing I'd recommend a minimum of 512MB). The first revision will, in all probability, redress this imbalance in the hardware DNA and should be timed to coincide with the retail release of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.