There’s just no use to trying to predict what Apple will announce at an upcoming media event.
Apple doesn’t tease you for months with lots of little bits of information. And you’ll learn the actual facts soon enough. Given that Apple announces these events only a week in advance, one wonders why anybody would be interested in reading about this stuff or, worse, writing it, when you’ll be looking at the Actual Thing in no time at all. The words “mental disorder” come to mind.
It’s like spending the weeks between the announcement of Academy Awards nominees and the telecast obsessively trying to predict who’ll win.
Which is, admittedly, something I do.
And I don’t actually get paid to do that, either.
Let’s just move on.
Of course there’ll be a new iPhone
To answer the question I’ve been fielding daily over the past month: yes, of course there’ll be a new iPhone tomorrow. The text on the media invite for tomorrow’s event reads “Let’s Talk iPhone.” Which is in line with the traditionally oracular and prone-to-misinterpretation nature of these invites.
Admittedly, “Let’s Talk iPhone” could mean “Let’s talk about why we won’t be shipping a new handset until 2012. And by ‘let’s’ we mean Karl, the operations director who thought he was ordering the manufacture of 5.2 million handsets and instead received a box from Foxconn containing exactly 52; and by ‘talk’ I mean ‘stands at the end of the stage while we all take turns firing a paintball gun into his bare chest. Apple does not comment on unannounced products or directions but yes, we’re going to be aiming for his nipples’.”
But no. There’ll be a new iPhone. All along I’ve had a hunch that it would be a component upgrade and not a radical new design. I’m anticipating a device that looks almost exactly like the existing iPhone 4 and features the same processor as the iPad 2, an upgraded camera, and additional application memory.
If that’s true, then it almost certainly won’t be called the iPhone 5. I reckon that Apple’s saving that name for the first 4G model, which I reckon we won’t see until 2012. Today, for all practical purposes, Verizon is the only US carrier with a national 4G network. All other carriers’ 4G towers are like a well-regarded arthouse movie. You’ve heard of it, and you want to experience it, but it’s only in a few cities. Verizon 4G is like a Batman movie; at this stage, it should have its own series of collectible 32-ounce cups at Burger King.
Apple won’t release 4G iPhones until all subscribers can have a similar 4G experience. I also think Apple would rather sacrifice data speed for extended battery life. But I do fully expect an announcement that Sprint has become the third US iPhone carrier.
If the new iPhone retains the same basic design as the iPhone 4, it’ll help answer a basic question that’s puzzled me over the past year: is Apple happy with that glass back panel? It seemed like a fundamentally risky choice last year. Isn’t there a reason why no other phone is made that way?
I dropped my iPhone 4 onto a concrete patio a few months ago and yup, the back panel shattered. I don’t know what to make of that (other than: it’s stupid to bend over to pick up a package when your iPhone is in your shirt pocket). It might mean that yes, this glass panel is needlessly prone to damage. Or it could mean that the iPhone 4 was designed to transmit shattering shocks to a cheap and easily-replaced panel on the back instead of the phone’s expensive display on the front.
We’ll find out tomorrow, in some fashion. If the new iPhone looks just like the iPhone 4 but has something other than glass for its back piece, it’ll amount to Apple sheepishly admitting that the glass back was a mistake . . . or that the material had been chosen because it was the only solution to an utterly confounding engineering problem at the time.
There have been rumblings that Apple will release a budget model as well. Mmm . . . I don’t see it. The old-generation iPhone 3GS is still a hot seller at $49 and it’s tough to imagine Apple building anything substantially better for about the same amount of money. Nor do I see them upgrading the 3GS design to add value, unless it’s a deep under-the-hood feature like additional application memory.
What about features?
But back to that “Let’s Talk iPhone” line. Apple’s long been rumored to be pursuing advanced speech recognition features for iOS. Last year, they acquired Siri, a company that had a spiffy speech-to-search app for the iPhone. You could say “Where are They Might Be Giants playing tonight?” and your iPhone would respond “The Berklee Performance Center in Boston, at 7 and 10.” Cool stuff. And in early 2011 there was deep buzz that Apple was licensing Nuance’s speech recognition engine.
The butter on the muffin: as reported on multiple Mac news sites, developers with access to prelease editions of the iPhone’s next OS have dug deep into its resource files and found a new keyboard layout that includes a microphone button.
Some caution is called for, though. Apple has said exactly zip about speech recognition and even developers are completely in the dark. It’s clear that Apple is moving in that direction but it’s quite possible that Apple will release a new iPhone with enough processing power to handle speech recognition, and a new OS that’s wired up to accommodate such a feature, but will hold the actual feature back until the company feels it’ll truly make the iPhone rock out with its dock out.
iPod updates
Speaking of rock, this is the traditional season for iPod updates. Look for the iPod Classic to finally be sent to its eternal reward. There was a time in music history when a band with a musical saw could succeed; that time has passed. Music players with hard drives are in the same situation.
Look for the iPod Touch to become even more like an iPad Nano. You don’t hear much about the Touch but it’s a solid success; it delivers all of the advantages of the iPhone, without the monthly bills and two-year contract. I even know plenty of people who are willing to buy a $250 Touch to go alongside their $200 Android phones.
I’ve gradually warmed to the 2010‘s tiny “color postage stamp screen on a clip” style iPod Nano. I’m still absolutely terrified that it’ll drop off my shirt while I’m not using it and I won’t notice I’ve lost a $149 thing until all hope of retracing my steps and finding it is gone. But the 2010 Nano was clearly optimized for active sports, and its super-minimalist design lends easily to creative cases and mounts. I’ve been wearing mine as a wristwatch off and on for a month now.
But was the design successful? As with the glass back panel on the 2010 iPhone, we’ll have our answer tomorrow. If Apple comes up with something radically different for the 2011 model, it’s an admission that the previous Nano looked great on a whiteboard but proved troublesome in the marketplace.
And is this the year that Apple drops the iPod Shuffle? Your guess is as good as mine. There are plenty of other music players that do far more for $49 (such as, I dunno, actually show you the title of the song you’re listening to) but the Shuffle still has the one feature that matters: when you connect it to your PC or Mac, iTunes syncs it automatically.
Apple TV
It’s hard to guess what Apple could do to improve the Apple TV. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but you don’t follow up one revolution with another. Last year, Apple did what they needed to do: they transformed the product from a vaguely-defined home media hub/quasi-computer to an invisible little box that projects content from any source on your home network or via Internet streaming services into your TV.
A new CPU? More application memory? Sure, why not. If both of those things happen, I encourage wild speculation about the imminent availability of some form of third-party apps for this iOS-based device.
iOS 5 and iCloud - at last
That’s the end of the Fall Apple Event Rumor checklist. People will ooh and aah over this stuff. The true highlight of tomorrow’s event, however, will be the first extensive live-fire demo of iOS 5 and Apple’s new iCloud service. I’m guessing that they’ll be released at some date in the imminent near-future rather than tomorrow, but please do get out a Sharpie and underscore the word “guessing” on your screen there.
How big is Apple’s new cloud service? So big that they practically rewrote their entire desktop OS around it. I’d even wager that it’s one of the reasons why the 2011 iPhone is shipping in the fall instead of the summer, as was traditional.
The ultimate goal is to provide a completely seamless experience between your iPhone, iPad, and desktop. If an idea hits me while I wait to place my deli order, I should be able to tap out a lede sentence or two and a rough outline on the text editor on my iPhone and find that document on my desktop by the time I get to my office just a half a second later.
(Yes, I have a deli in my office. I lose the tax incentives on this property if I don’t keep part of the floor space as a working restaurant.)
iOS 5 itself will be revolutionary by its mere nature, though most of its new features will be longstanding items off of the “Why do Android phones do that so much better?” list. A new Notification Center, for example, creates a single, orderly bin to replace the slightly barmy old system, in which multiple texts and app notifications appear as a stack of dialog boxes that must be solemnly dismissed one by one.
iMessage will be a bit of a game changer. Essentially it delivers unlimited free texting and chat to any other iOS user. Most of the people I text with use iPhones and once everybody’s upgraded to iOS 5, I can consider discontinuing my text service entirely.
So that’s what I think we’ll see tomorrow. Take it all with a grain of salt. Just as with the Oscars, predicting Apple announcements is the gift that keeps on giving: first I get to write about what I think will happen, and then I get to write about what actually happened and why I was right even when I was wrong. Check back on Tuesday. I’ll be on the red carpet with my daughter Melissa, making meanspirited fun of the dramatic ballgowns being worn by the glittering celebrities of tech journalism.
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