06/01/2007, 10:50am, EDT
Friday, June 1st
Analyst offers WWDC predictions
Apple CEO Steve Jobs is scheduled to deliver his WWDC 2007 keynote speech in San Francisco on Monday, June 11th and will likely focus on Mac OS X Leopard's secret features alongside new Macs, according to American Technology Research senior analyst Shaw Wu. "We anticipate focus on Mac OS X Leopard, its next-generation operating system, and introduction of new Macs," Wu wrote in a research note obtained by MacNN. "We also believe the most anticipated announcement will revolve around its undocumented secret features in Mac OS X Leopard." American Technology Research maintains its "Buy" rating on Apple shares with a $145 price target.
The analyst believes that like himself, many in the user community are hoping Apple will unveil "virtual machine" technology that allows users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously to provide seamless operation of Mac and Windows without rebooting.
"We believe this would serve as a major catalyst for Mac sales," remarked Wu, referring to the possibility of virtual machine technology built into Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. "We continue to believe the key reason why Leopard was delayed until October is to give developers time to test secret features."
The analyst is eagerly awaiting the unveiling of Leopard's secret features, and sees several catalysts in the quarters ahead for the Cupertino-based company which include Mac OS X Leopard, new Macs, new iPods, new movie and carrier partners, and lower cost cellular phones.
Specifically, Wu expects Jobs to debut new MacBook Pros with LED-backlit displays as well as Intel's new Santa Rosa platform during his keynote speech in California to kick off the World Wide Developer's Conference. The new MacBook Pros will offer higher performance, enhanced graphics as well as video capability, superior displays, and better battery life than the more mainstream MacBook, according to Wu.
The analyst also believes a new subnotebook or "MacBook mini" is possible but less likely to surface at the event. The "fair likelihood" of a MacBook mini that utilizes NAND flash as primary storage could ship as soon as late 2007.
"We are told that timing will be dependent on NAND vendors' willingness to accelerate price declines, making NAND economically attractive for Apple to use in lieu of hard disk storage," Wu said.
In conclusion, American Technology Research looks to Parallels Desktop as a fallback if Apple elects to sidestep "virtual machine" technology. As the ability to run Windows is a major selling point for Mac OS X, the $80 purchase would enable Mac owners to run Windows alongside Mac OS X without rebooting despite a potential decision to avoid virtual machine integration.
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There's a biiiig difference between what they "can" expect and what Wu believes they "might" expect.
They can expect Apple will cover some Leopard stuff. They can also expect a lot of marketing info to be presented. They can expect Apple to thenk their developer community.
After that, it's speculation.
If you had seen any Leopard beta up to this point, you would have no doubt in you mind that Apple needs to come up with something a lot bigger and better that what can be seen so far. There HAVE to be "secret features" (as in "not previously implemented in the betas") if they don't want to be ridiculed.
Because, so far, the Leopard betas look like Tiger with a few shareware apps (Time Machine, Spaces) thrown in. There's nothing else to distinguish 10.5 from 10.4. Yet.
From a historical perspective, that probably won't be the case for some users, seemingly no matter what they add to the software package.
Some other distinguishing points of Leopard vs. Tiger are under-the-hood things you won't generally notice as a casual user.
Here is some wild speculation, though. What if Apple decided to move the browser and mail client choices back to the System Preferences where they belong?
Or, maybe a sane assumption about multibutton mice, like, enable right clicks by default!
How cool would THAT be!!?!!! :D
However, I think Leopard is going to be “big” from the perspective of users as well. My main guess for a major feature would be that the 3-D style user interface used in TimeMachine could make its way onto the standard desktop. I think that would likely be tough but “doable” for Apple’s software engineers.
My main reason for thinking this is that Apple software engineers have been really pushing developers to put more “wow” into our applications. They have radically improved and simplified the graphic tools at our disposal, to such an extent that I do think we are now more regularly bumping up against the standard OS X interface as a limiting factor.
There are another two “rumor-ish” reasons why I think this kind of big change is in the offing. One is just observing how excited Steve Jobs has been about this release in the past. When he announced OS 10.4 in his keynote at WWDC 2005, there was a moment when you could see he was wrestling with a real impulse to say more about Leopard. It would take something really big to generate that kind of eagerness, when he was in the midst of announcing the shift to Intel processors.
It was interesting to note that one of the interviewers at the recent D conference (I think Walt Mossberg) asked Bill Gates if he thought the basic user interface was going to evolve (arguably there has been really little evolution in this since about Mac OS 6 or so -- some great tweaks, but the essential paradigm has been little changed). Mr Gates sort of rambled off a little in response -- I think his perspective is fixed on the next 10 years, not the next 5. It would be silly to read too much into this, but Mr Jobs wasn’t asked a similar question.
Anyway, it is a possibility. I certainly don’t have any “inside” information, and there has been nothing specific revealed to developers that would even hint at this -- otherwise I could not have said anything!