2010: The Year Apple Makes Contact?
Written by Alex Kidman Tuesday, 05 January 2010 06:23
Working out exactly what Apple's actually up to at any given moment is a tricky business. Sure, Steve Jobs is busy playing around in big piles of everyone else's money, and a small army of marketing people are busying themselves not commenting on the company's future plans to an extent and in a manner so distinctly Apple’s that they may as well go ahead and patent it.
So where does that leave the traditional predictions for the year's crop of Apples? Well, as for everyone else, I am reduced pretty much to guesswork and speculation. Or, if you like the appearances of legitimacy, "sources have indicated" to me the following scenarios.
No, not really.
They're just my own hunches, and I'm sure that a bunch of them will be dead wrong. If nothing else, check back in twelve months and work out how well I actually did. In my own defense, I did pick that OS X 10.6 would be called "Snow Leopard" a long time before Apple officially announced it, so perhaps I do have latent psychic powers. Anyway, here's my pick of what Apple will do in 2010:
Keep taking the tablets until the pain stops. Yes, there will be an Apple tablet. I'd be suggesting the early part of the year — Apple may even choose to "shock" CES in Las Vegas with this one — but that I suspect has more to do with not wanting to burn out the hype cycle and possibly get beaten to market, as well as having a few other product lines to launch later in the year. I can't quite shake this feeling that it might be a US-only product at first, depending on how content's going to be delivered and who ends up paying for the bandwidth. Unless it's just a MacBook in tablet form, in which case expect Apple's stock to tumble rapidly.
Nokia pwns Apple? This, I suspect, is going to be the big story of 2010 in Apple circles. Mud is starting to fly at a rapid pace, with Nokia now claiming that "almost all" of Apple's products infringe on Nokia's lengthy patent portfolio. It does leave me wondering where Nokia's identified non-infringing products. Perhaps even Nokia doesn't want the Mighty Mouse. That aside, this one will run and run and more mud will be flung from both sides.
There are two realistic scenarios for 2010.
The first case calls for less mutually-assured patent destruction, and will end with a brief release somewhat similar to this: "Apple Inc. and Nokia today announced a settlement of all outstanding patent claims with neither side admitting liability (but one side backing up a beeping truck full of unmarked dollars/euro to the appropriate headquarters). Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh."
The other scenario, and the one I suspect is more likely, says things will get worse, and lawyers on both sides will get substantially richer before we see that release. If anyone from either Apple’s or Nokia's legal team would like to use that release, by the way, I'll let you know I've already patented it. My terms are ... reasonable.
iWork: Less innovation, more .com. clinton1550's already given his take on what he'd like to see in iPhoto 2010 so I won't re-invent the wheel here. I suspect where we'll see a lot more work isn't so much on the interface side, where Apple tends to tinker rather than outright relaunch, but on the iWork.com side. Apple's been sitting on the Beta release since January of 2009, and while staying in Beta is a very Google kind of thing to do, Apple tends to look more towards finished products. Then again, Google's exactly the competition that Apple will be targeting with iWork.com, but to do so it needs to beef it up and make it a genuinely compelling option for iWork users.
iPhone 4G? Clearly, this will happen. Apple's not in a hurry to break the bank in hardware terms on things like cameras, so I wouldn't be shocked to see something as mundane as a five-megapixel sensor within the next iPhone, and hopefully a beefed-up battery. If the idle speculation — sorry, rumours ... no, wait, idle speculation's probably more accurate — on the tablet running iPhone Apps is correct, Apple's not really likely to reinvent the iPhone in its fourth generation, but instead again tinker around the edges.
Endangered Snow Leopard? Will 2010 be the year of OS X 10.7?
No.
Steve Jobs loses a job. Predictions are nothing without a little controversy, so here's one. Steve Jobs will step down as CEO of Apple, Inc by the close of 2010.
Before anyone rushes off to the stock market to dump Apple shares, or Apple gets in touch with the expensive lawyers, I'll point out that it's just a prediction, not a set fact, and I don't have Steve's home number or anything like that. But as predictions go, I reckon it makes a lot of sense.
Even given his six-month hiatus in the first half of 2009, how prominent was Steve Jobs in Apple's product presentations in the second half of the year? Virtually invisible. The press releases for Apple's second-half products were free of Jobs quotes, instead generally using Phil Schiller as the official "voice" of all things Apple. Sure, being CEO involves more than appearing on the posters, and I doubt Steve's influence will wane rapidly, but clearly the company is repositioning itself as a bit more than just the Cult Of Jobs, and with Steve still as the CEO that's a little tricky to do.
Death of the iPod. I may as well finish with a bang. I reckon the iPod's doomed. Not the whole line, you understand, but if you were picking an iconic image to represent "iPod", the one that you'd pick.
The one that Apple now calls the "iPod Classic", and the only model that still ships with an integrated hard drive. Frankly, I'm a little bit surprised that Apple's stuck with the Classic as long as it has, as every other iPod model fits a purpose: the Shuffle's for folk who must have something Apple branded (I've long held you'd be better off with a cheaper flash memory player, as in a screen-free world they're all terribly similar); the Nano works well for the sporty crowd and those who don't want Apps; and the Touch is the neutered iPhone that still makes Apple a lot of money from those aforementioned Apps. Where does that leave the Classic? Making that long trip where, I'm sure Apple will tell us, it'll go on to live a long and happy life in landfill.
That is, I meant to say, on a farm. I'm sure it'll be very happy there.
What do you think Apple has in store for 2010?
Discuss it with me at MacTheForum!
