Saturday, January 26, 2008

Macworld - the Aftermath

Okay, so a bunch of my predictions were off. I did hit the idea of the Slim Book (now known as the MacBook Air) although rumors of that were all over the blogsphere. But my guess was right that Apple would come up with an elegant solution and game changing idea to leave optical disks behind.

And Apple certainly retooled it's AppleTV to support HD downloads like I imagined although I still wished that it had a digital tuner and could work as a DVR. I would gladly pay $299 for such a unit. But the call on iTunes HD was right on.

The rest of the hardware in terms of MacBooks and MacBook Pros fell off the wagon - no updates to those. Nor anything in regards to the hardware of the iPhone or iPods. But this is the opening gates of 2008 and there are months to go where product refreshes and updates can make a huge difference.

One thing that Apple is probably going to make a big splash over is the SDK (software development kit) for the iPhone. I'm betting with the release of the SDK, there will be a bunch of critical software releases, either by Apple or by other software developers.

The one release I'm hoping for is the ability to synchronize with Microsoft Exchange in a secure way. I think that this will have a huge impact on business purchases and could blow the next quarter out. It will probably require a whole different Mail and Calendar application because I doubt that Apple will change their Mail application and iCal. This has been their approach because Exchange in some ways, competes with Apple's own server mail offerings.

I don't know any details but I've heard rumblings that a solution is being worked on but I'm not sure if by Apple or Microsoft. And I don't know when.

Either way, I hope very soon to be pleasantly surprised.