Preamble

To understand my predictions for WWDC 2008, you need to understand where I think Apple is going in the next 24 months. To view the iPhone as a stand-alone product is to miss the point. The point of the iPhone is to create a development ecosystem around Objective-C and Cocoa. This ecosystem will have spill-over benefits for the Mac, since more developers will be familiar with the platform’s development technologies, but the real point is to create a large population of developers already familiar with application development for Apple’s next device: a touch tablet. This is why Apple is suddenly pushing “OSX” instead of “Mac OSX” and “iPhone OS”—Apple wants to impress upon developers that the skills for developing on any OSX device carry over to the other Apple devices as well.

With that out of the way, on to my predictions!

Next-Generation iPhone

3G: Yes

This seems like a given.

GPS: Yes

With all of the concentration on 3G capabilities, discussion about GPS seems to have died down a bit. While GPS technology takes away space and power from other solutions apple could provide in the iPhone’s form factor (such as video conferencing), I think that improved positional capabilities will create many 3rd party developer opportunities.

Faster Processor: No

I think there are so many other bells and whistles going into this revision that Apple will be happy to use a processor with the same speed and power consumption as the current model.

Video Conferencing: No

With 3G network speeds, this becomes possible and it is an intriguing possibility. But supporting (1) video capture, (2) video encoding before sending, (3) bi-directional communication over 3G (or WiFi), (4) video decoding what you’re friend is sending you, and (5) continual screen updates to display the video—all at the same time—will simply kill the battery life.

Thicker (face-to-back): Yes

Since the current iPhone is a 1.0 product, I’m willing to believe that Apple learned a lot during its development and—knowing what they know now—could redesign the current iPhone to be smaller with lower power consumption. Starting from that assumption and adding 3G, GPS, and a larger battery to the mix, I believe that the new iPhone will have to be more voluminous. It can’t get much wider without becoming uncomfortable to hold, and it’s current height seems about right, so I believe that the phone will grow a little thicker.

iPhone mini: Yes

Take the current 8GB iPhone, make it a little smaller, and offer it in a variety of colors for $350. Offer a 4GB model for $250. Pesto! You have a device that may attract the interest of my wife. Since I didn’t understand the point of the iPod mini until I witnessed my wife’s reaction, I’ve come to trust her judgement over mine for products Apple targets at non-technophiles.

Higher pricing: Yes

Components: there are more of them and they are more expensive. With the addition of the iPhone mini at a lower price point, Apple will have a little breathing room on the high end. I expect the 8GB model to retain its current pricing and the addition of a 16GB model for $100 more.

SquirrelFish: Yes

Squirrelfish helps the iPhone in two ways. First, Squirrelfish is fast, provides users with an improved Web browsing experience. Second, it is more efficient—getting the same end result accomplished in fewer clock cycles, so it requires less power to run JavaScript.

iPhone widgets: No

In the latest episode of The Talk Show, Dan and John kick around the idea that iPhone widget applications may make a comeback: applications for the iPhone written entirely in HTML+JavaScript+CSS, facilitated by a DashCode development tool specific to the iPhone. There is a lot of sense to this from the perspective that it would invite everyone skilled in Web design to be an iPhone developer. However, as I stated in my preamble, I believe Apple can use the popularity of the iPhone as a means to push Objective-C and Cocoa, thus building a larger community of developers skilled in the technologies that underlie all of Apple’s “software-expandable” offerings.

Apple Software

OSX 10.6 Will Be Announced: Yes

Steve is quoted (somewhere—sorry, no link) as stating that he wanted to be releasing updates to Leopard on a more frequent schedule than was indicated by the delay between 10.4 and 10.5. Announcing 10.6 at WWDC with it’s release due at MacWorld seems about right to me.

10.6 Named Snow Leopard: Yes

Sure, why not?

10.6 Will Specifically be for Atom Devices: No

This was posited by Josh Bancroft and I think he’s generally right that OSX is being pushed as its own brand to allow for OSX on a new device, but I don’t think it will be announced at WWDC.

OSX 10.6 Will Drop PPC Support: Yes

This completely sucks for PowerMac G5 owners. You’re the losers of an unexpectedly rapid and successful migration to Intel. As a life-long loser myself, I sympathize.

OSX 10.6 Will Drop Carbon Support: Yes

Apple wanted to drop Carbon support long ago, but the old-time Apple developers complained and—probably more importantly—Microsoft and Adobe were unable (and perhaps unwilling) to migrate off their Carbon code bases. Reading the tea leaves, Carbon’s now a goner. Apple used the Intel migration as leverage to push developers toward Cocoa, then Leopard didn’t include support for 64-bit Carbon. If the rumors that 10.6 will be 100% 64-bit are true, that rules out Carbon. Good bye.

New / Improved / Revamped .Mac Services: Yes

Please! I’ve had .Mac service since I purchased my first Mac and it was fine for a while—I didn’t mind the premium price at first because it “just worked” and that’s what I wanted. But each of the last three years I’ve been really close to canceling my membership and Apple would announce something that would make .Mac just barely worthwhile enough to continue holding onto. This year, though, if I’m not blown away, I’m canceling it. Or whatever they will call it.

.Mac Rebranding: Yes

It’s hard to sell something called ”.Mac” to a person whose only Apple product is an iPhone. Explaining that .Mac doesn’t require a Mac must be a nightmare.

Apple Hardware

New Apple Device: No

I believe that 2009 will be the year of the tablet, so no new devices this year.

New MBP Designs: Yes

I’m just guessing here.

New Displays: No

I think that the displays will be revamped when the Mac Pro is redesigned.

Pie-In-The-Sky Prediction

Every good WWDC prognosticator needs to go out on a limb and make an off-the-wall or out-of-left-field prediction.

OSX 10.6 Adds Resolution Independence

Despite the rumors that 10.6 will be focused on stability and performance instead of features, I think that this will be on the short list of enhancements.

Okay, the term “benchmark” might be too strong. I ran one of my favorite applets on the 15″ MacBook Pro while at an Apple Store today. I took screen shots of the results to compare to the performance of my own PowerBook. The applet is a 3D visualization of a KohonenSelf-Organizing Map. The Kohonen Map is a type of neural network used to automatically group similar inputs and provide visiualization of large quantities of data. Another interesting application of the Kohonen Map is to solve very large TSP-type problems.
Anyway, this applet is interesting because it has simple 3D graphics, lots of floating point and integer math, and possibly a good amount of object allocation and garbage collection. I don’t know if the applet is multi-threaded, though, but by the results I would guess that it is not. Thus, this is a highly imperfect comparison between the PPC and Intel Macs.

System specs:
PPC: 17″ 1.33GHz PowerBook with 1.0GB RAM
Intel: 15″ 2.0GHz MacBook Pro with 1.5GB RAM

Raw Results:
PPC:

Intel:

Numbers:
PPC: 1107 learning cycles in 138.697 seconds (7.981 learning cycles / second)
Intel: 1100 learning cycles in 62.514 seconds (17.62 learning cycles / second)

X-Factor:
The MacBook Pro is 2.2x faster than my PowerBook on Java performance. Assuming that the applet is single-threaded, the MacBook’s JVM 1.47x more efficient per CPU clock cycle.

I’d like to also note that the applet’s 3D animation was much smoother on the MacBook than it was on my PowerBook.

What distinguishes a PC from a Mac is more a matter of its BIOS and hardware component architecture than its CPU. Since the x86 Mac will remain a closed architecture under control by Apple, I do not expect to lose the Mac Experience in the transition.

As a computer user, I don’t care about the what’s inside the box, I just want it to work. I take for granted now the flawless sleep and wake cycles through which I put my laptop, but I still encounter Wintel laptop users who are amazed that I close my notebook with such confidence that everything will be as it was when I open it again. As a developer and power user, I still don’t care about what’s running under the hood, so long as it runs what I want fast and doesn’t “get in the way”. Finally, as a laptop user, I need all that reliability and power to run for 3-4 hours on a battery. I have no reason to believe that these needs will not continue to be met by Apple — no matter what CPU is crunching the numbers.

I donated all of my old computer equipment to a local school system last year, so a new server means new kit. Thinking of a Linux server, I looked up Dell‘s offerings, since I get an employee discount with them. It would be $420 + shipping for the lowest-end box they offer. That’s close enough to the price of a Mac mini (with my employee discount) that I seriously contemplated that angle. Still, the $400+ price range is more than I want to invest in this project at this time.

Then I recalled that the Linksys NSLU2 can be hacked to upgrade its Linux kernel and services. I want to keep my current NSLU2 as a file server for my home network, so I would need a new NSLU2 ($80) and a small, external USB2 hard drive ($80). That’s more in line with my price range. Looking over the NSLU2-Linux sites, it certainly runs Web servers serving static content just fine. But does it run Java?

The NSLU2 runs on an Intel IXP425 Xscale CPU. I was unaware of any Java runtimes for the processor until I came across Kaffe. This is not the first time I’ve heard of Kaffe, but it is the first time I’ve seriously considered it. This thread indicates that the newest versions (1.1.4) should build on NSLU2-Linux. Kaffe’s compatability reports indicate that it should be suitable for server-side applications. Intrigued, I dug further and found some hope that Tomcat will run on Kaffe with minimal tweaking.

So I’ll sleep on it a while and revisit the idea of setting up a Servlet server on an NSLU2 “soon”.