October 14th is upon us. At 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California Steve Jobs is getting ready to present Apple's new notebooks. Here in Denver, Colorado I've been scouting every industry blog and news article to try and predict what he will show. It's like Apple branded Christmas. Engadget and Gizmodo both ran a story last night showing a two-tone MacBook Pro. All aluminum but with black keys like the MacBook Air. Additionally it's screen takes a cue from the current generation iMacs with a full glass screen with black borders. It did not seem to have a trackpad button, kind of confirming that it will have a glass trackpad. I'm going to go ahead and say I believe that is the actual new MBP. The 'brick' is most likely the new manufactoring process in which the laptop is engineered out of a hollowed out piece of aluminum. Early reports show that it has some kind of new port that is smaller than microDVI. While talking to a friend we kind if agreed this has to be a way for them to get HDMI and DVI support into the machines, maybe even eSATA (which I woiuld love to see). This will go nicely with Nvidia's hybrid dual-SLI graphics, the machines will run the new Core Animation powered Photoshop like if it were chess.app. I believe there will be a change to the MacBook Air today aswell even If it's just a processor update. I believe there will be a update to the MacBook, but I doubt they'd be turning aluminum. I favor the though that a new 13" MBP will be introduced. The rumored $899 device will be a monitor or display unit of some sort. We haven't seen any hardware leaks to give validity to the thought that it's a 'netbook'. I agree with John Gruber that we will not see a refresh of iWork or of iLife today, I believe those will come at MWSF'09 with Snow Leopard. I want to just write down that appart from eSATA, which would be nice, what I really want is an user acessible hard drive bay. If I find a cheap SSD, I don't want to void my warranty just to update it. Well that's about it. Let's see how off base I am, and let's see if I end up getting a laptop from this batch. Update 1: John Gruber over at Daring Fireball posted a full preview and he is way smarter than I am, and more connected. (Thanks to fontgoddess to pointing this out over twitter, I would have probably have missed it until after the event.)
Mandatory Apple Event Predictions
· 5 min read