Predicting is more of an art than a science sometimes. There’s only one “sure thing” in this list. Everything else – take with a grain of salt. If I knew, and reported to you here, the exact release dates and details of new hardware and software, there’d be lawyers at my door fast than a pop-up window in IE for Windows.

First, the sure thing. Sometime in the first half of 2005, Apple will release the next major revision to the Mac operating system. It’s called “Tiger”, but its official name will be Mac OS v10.4. Among a host of other improvements (many more than I can detail in this limited space), Tiger will bring powerful search and organization tools to the Mac desktop, There’ll be much more to report after MacWorld Expo the second week of January, so stay tuned. Oh, and unlike other platforms, you won’t need a whole new computer to use it. What a concept!

From here on, everything is conjecture. Some of it is “informed” conjecture, some is more “out there”. But, hey, that’s the way of prognostication. Here we go.

Building on the huge success of the current line-up of hard-drive-based iPods, Apple will release the “iPod flash”. The “iPod flash” will store its music on the same kind of memory used in digital cameras and those key-fob-sized memory doo-hickies (a technical term for “device”). They’ll be small, have awesome battery life (no moving parts), will be relatively inexpensive, and will sell like hot cakes. Many (including serious business magazines like Forbes) believe that Apple will also release a 5 GB version of the iPod mini (versus the 4 GB model currently available). I also believe there will be no “iPod video” released in the coming year. The market, and the means to get good content onto such a device, is just not ready yet.

Hardware. The top-of-the-line PowerMac G5s will hit 3 GHz processor speed by mid-year and perhaps 3.5 GHz by year’s end. Expect the iMac G5 to reach 2 GHz as well. Will there be a PowerBook G5? Apple’s engineering the hot (in both speed and, well, heat) G5 processor into the slim iMac is a step in that direction, but I don’t see a PowerBook G5 until year’s end, at least. I do expect speed-and-feature-bumped PowerBook G4s to come along soon, perhaps announced at MacWorld in January.

How many of you Windows users have thought, “Hey, if they just made a Mac I could buy for around $500, I would seriously consider making the jump to Mac”? Rumors are swirling of a coming bare bones, G4-based “headless” iMac, possibly without a display. Details are sketchy, but a low-cost model to entice new users makes sense, at least to me.

On to software. To accompany Mac OS v10.4, Apple will also need to release a major update to the iLife suite of “digital lifestyle” applications – iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes, and GarageBand. There are also rumors of a FireWire-based companion product for GarageBand, the home music recording studio. It’ll be a small box that manages inputs from microphones, guitars, and MIDI keyboards into the Mac to make home recording even easier.

Apple will also finally update the venerable AppleWorks suite, renaming it “iWorks”. It’ll feature MS Office compatible text and spreadsheet documents. Also expect the release of Keynote 2.0, Apple’s PowerPoint-like presentation software. Keynote 1.0 already makes easier-to-build, better-looking slides than PowerPoint, but lacks some of PowerPoint’s abilities to, say, create a slideshow that runs by itself over time. Expect features like this to show up in Keynote 2.0.

What will really happen? Only time will tell.

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski