WWDC – Apple’s annual conference for its developer community – starts today in the US. As always, there has been a ton of speculation and guesswork around what could possibly be announced.
Steve Jobs kicks it all off today at 6pm BST with his opening keynote, where he is widely tipped to announced the latest iPhone iteration. But what else will the conference bring?
Here are my tips (in order of likelihood):
- New iPhone – it’s a dead cert really, but will the leaks be true and what else will it include? The name is also still tbc – iPhone 4, iPhone HD? And finally, when will it be released?
- iPhone OS 4.0 – we had the sneak peak in January, so expect the new OS to be packaged up with the new phone and probably for iPhone 3GS users too. iPad owners may just had to make do with OS 3.3 until 4.0 is rolled out later in the year
- Refreshed Mac Mini, Mac Pro and Macbook Air – the first two are probably more likely but all three models are long overdue a refresh
- Safari 5 – browser wars are hotting up again and with Apple’s latest fight with Adobe over flash, a browser that includes the latest HTML5 support makes sense. There are also rumours about extensions being added too
- Itunes.com – Following the acquistion of Lala last December, this has increasingly been on the cards and with the success of Spotify, would make sense. It may be a few months too soon however
- Free MobileMe – this service has never really taken off, but if it was free, you could expect a lot more people to take it for a test drive
- iPod Touch – this hasn’t been updated for yonks, so is definitely due for a refresh. Does anyone care though?
- Mac OS X 10.7 – probably too much to expect the full launch of the next Mac OS, but a sneak peak could be on the cards
- iPad price drop – unlikely as the launch was so delayed in Europe, but this has happened with other new Apple products in the past
- One more thing… – Steve hasn’t done a OMT in recent years, but this time round, especially after all the leaks, I wouldn’t be surprised if he something up his sleeve…
Usually you have to rely on text coverage from Gizmodo, Engadget or GDGT and the like to follow the event live, but apparently www.ihackintosh.com and Macrumorslive.com are going to be offering live audio and video streaming from the room.
Anything I’ve missed?