What I'm expecting Apple to announce at WWDC
Thursday, 27 May, 2010 — apple iphone ipad
A little while back, I talked about what I hoped Apple would announce as part of the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement. I didn’t do particularly well, But there’s still a lot of room for surprises when all of the features in iPhone OS 4.0 become publicly known.
In a little more than a week, Steve Jobs is going to take the stage at Moscone West at the Worldwide Developers Conference and … say some things. Drawing from some of the speculation I’ve seen floating around, here’s what I’m anticipating:
- The iPhone 4G formally announced
- I suspect Steve is going to acknowledge Gray Powell from the stage in a never-to-be-repeated moment
- Apple responds to Google I/O by fleshing out the iPhone OS 4.0 feature set
- Faster MobileSafari performance. Apple and Google are going to race (and likely swap leads frequently) in terms of tuning WebKit’s performance for mobile devices
- Free MobileMe – or a free, syncing, subset of MobileMe – for iPhone and iPad customers. This addresses Google’s cloud strategy with Android and hopefully improves the experience of setting down a laptop and picking up an iPad for apps like iWork
- iTunes in the cloud – Based on Lala.com, if you’ve purchased the songs, you can listen to them from elsewhere
- The last two items are facilitated by that giant Apple data center in Maiden, NC, even if they aren’t strictly developer related, they’re demonstrable technologies. I think I see a Dropbox-type, Document-centric thing happening that’ll improve how users work across multiple devices
- Safari 5 announced. Plug-in/extension support, better recovery from quit/crashed sessions. And about damned time
- A 27-inch LED Cinema Display, replacing the 30-inch Cinema Display as the 24-inch LED Cinema Display gains audio via Mini DisplayPort and a lower pricetag
- Modest refresh of the Mac Pros (newer CPUs, no Blu-Ray). These will be announced by press release. As might the LED Cinema Displays
- No demo of Mac OS X 10.7. Apple’s clearly focused on the iPhone OS this year. That’s fine, Snow Leopard kicks ass. A refreshed GUI can wait for next June