Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

And the a tradition continues. Here’s my predictions for WWDC 2008. Steve Jobs will announce the following:

iPhone 3G

Well duh. At this point if it’s not at least announced, Apple’s stock is going to tank. There’s a ton of stuff to back this up including AT&T telling employees not to take vacation in the near future. And mystery shipments of presumed iPhones. I’ve got a good idea what the technical specs will likely be.

AT&T Subsidy

AT&T will likely subsidy the new iPhone when purchased with a 2 year contract to help lower the price and encourage more people to buy it. This is looking even more likely as the economy declines and potential buyers may now be more hesitant.

.mac to become me.com and mobileme.com

.mac will finally die and be replaced with me.com and mobileme.com. I suspect mobileme.com will be free for iPhone users. me.com may be paid if Apple does it in-house, or free if they contract the functionality out to someone like Google (which is likely).

Mac OS X 10.6 Insights

I don’t think we’ll see it until at least late 2009, more likely early 2010, and I doubt Steve will suggest any faster of a timeline. Remember after 10.3 the plan was slower OS releases. I suspect it will stay that way. I don’t think Apple likes the idea of two Mac OS X branches, the mobile and desktop one. I suspect 10.6 will be an effort to “unify” the platform at least from a marketing perspective. Starting from WWDC 2008 onwards I suspect a “Mac OS X powered phone” will be more common branding. Again Apple’s goal is to sell computers. Using the iPhone as a method to sell the desktop experience is pretty obvious. But what does that mean for the OS? Likely a lot of focus on things like Sync, the future of tech (64bit, multi-core, intel) and blurring the distinction between phone and computer. I don’t think we’ll see much more than a little eye candy and some buzz words considering we’re not far from Leopards release. Just enough to get the press talking about it.

New Desktops / Laptops

I don’t think Apple plans any desktop/laptop announcements just yet, I suspect they will hold off until August as tradition. At that point pretty much all of Apple’s computer lines are due for a major overhaul. I suspect the MacBook Pro may be the first to experience a major design change. Apple desperately needs a mid-range tower to build more market share as the Mac mini is under powered and the Mac Pro is very expensive. If anything is announced I suspect it will be just that.

Special Guests

No idea who the special guests will be. If the new iPhone is based on Atom, I suspect an Intel Exec. Other than that, really don’t know. Likely an iPhone developer or two will make an appearance during the iPhone Apps part. No clue on musical guest.

So there you have it. We’ll see Monday what I got right.

Last week it seemed that Steve Jobs would appear in Epcot’s Spaceship Earth, while Woz would get shafted. Apparently that’s not the case. Gizmodo has some pictures of the new Spaceship Earth that feature a larger-boned scruffy fellow sitting in a garage. As a opposed to a lanky guy. So now it seems Woz is featured in Spaceship Earth.

The character also has a very similar shirt to that of a somewhat famous picture. Another thing Gizmodo didn’t even notice is that you don’t really see Jobs wearing glasses until sometime in the 80’s. In fact, I don’t think Jobs was really seen with glasses until after his first stint at Apple (most if not all pictures show him without). Wozniak on the other hand is seen with glasses dating as far back as the 70’s when this scene would have been taking place. This leads me to believe this character must indeed be Steve Wozniak.

More pictures can be found at lifthill.

According to a blog post at distant creations, a Steve Jobs like character will be in the newly remodeled Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Missing will be Steve Wozniak. The character apparently won’t be referenced by name. It should be noted Steve Jobs is a member of Disney’s Board of Directors and the largest shareholder.

Readers know I’ve been big on Apple opening up the iPhone/iTouch to developers since the beginning. Apple finally came through announcing a SDK will be made available, though not until early next year. It specifically noted Apps will work on the iPod touch as well. About time. All of a sudden these devices went from being cool, but not really worthwhile to having massive potential. Still missing on the iPhone is 3G, but that’s coming, and likely in an ‘08 refresh of the product line.

Gizmodo has an interesting banner on top of their coverage of the announcement. Notice the positioning of the Firefox logo. This comes pretty soon after the announcement of the Firefox Mobile effort. Provided the SDK provided is good enough, I think there’s a pretty good chance we will see a Gecko product on the iPhone in the not too distant future. For quite some time it will likely be Minimo based and very simple, not the more robust plans which require Mozilla 2.

On a side note, I’m surprised nobody has managed to get Linux running on the iPod touch yet. I thought that would have happened by now. The iPhone would be somewhat pointless since getting the phone functionality to work would be a real battle.

Some sort of simulator/emulator to aid development would also be interesting, though I don’t think that’s very likely.

Overall it’s great news. Lets see that SDK already!

Below is what was posted on Apple’s site today

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Today’s video clip is Steve Jobs presenting the Macintosh in 1984. The video early on is slightly dark, but bare with it, the important parts to see are fine. Remember while watching that this was 1984 back when monochrome and DOS were king. The Mac was reading text back and using a GUI.

Another video worth watching is of Steve Jobs Commencement Speech at Stanford (2005). Just make you wonder what you’d see if you step back and looked at the dots you connected over the years.

How long until this results in Mac World Disney World or MacWorld Disney Land?

That’s what we all really want to know.

As is tradition, April 1 is a day where you don’t believe anything you see on the Internet. Here are some of my favorite pranks so far:

• Wikipedia claims Encyclopedia Britannica has initiated a “semi-hostile” takeover
• Paris Hilton recruited to give Linux more exposure.
• Tiger Woods named spokesman for Apple just prior to the release of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger”.
• First Computer -> Human Virus Discovered. Lets hope “Malwarlaria.B” Vaccines are available soon. Could this be terrorism related?
• Google is going up against Coke, Pepsi, Gatorade, with Google Gulp
• MSSQL for Linux, Unix and XBox coming soon.
• The Commentator. Writes comments in your code for you!
• Ltoast from Linspire.
• Google acquires the Mozilla Foundation [press release].
• Steve Jobs joins the Mozilla Foundation. Mitchell’s Reaction, Asa’s Denial

I’ll update this post if I spot some more good ones.