Sunday, May 29, 2005

My WWDC Predictions (and yack about random stuff)
Disclaimer: I don't really read the Mac Rumor sites anymore, so this stuff might have already been speculated on. If so, take this as confirmation that maybe, just maybe it's a good idea.

Things I think will happen at WWDC:

  1. (75% chance) 3GHZ G5s. Jobs said we would have them about a year ago.. I suspect he'll announce them during his keynote, even if they won't be available until September.
  2. (50% chance) iTunes 5.0 (other stuff + support for "podcasts".)

    I sort of suspect this won't be open for every podcaster - perhaps involving Adam Curry's podshow and/or Sirius. What I suspect will happen is that the podshow, and/or other Sirius shows will be available from iTunes, automatically downloaded to your machine (ala podcasts), for 10-20 cents per episode. (Anything announced by Sirius would also pre-announce the availability of the Howard Stern's show via this distribution method, when he makes the leap to satellite in a few years.)

    Why make Sirius shows available this way? In a way it saves the consumer money - listen to the one or two shows you like, without the monthly cost of a Sirius subscription. It is another revenue stream for Sirius, another way to get that content Out To People (and to make some money doing it.)

  3. (2% chance) The Apple Tablet, or something to compete with the Palm Lifedrive. In a way, this doesn't seem to threaten Apple's markets... in another way, it seems like the goal of iLife (use these applications to store/make your music/media/documents). In another way, I don't see this as a big enough threat to make Apple step back into the handheld market (aka: the second coming of the the Newton.)

Regardless, we won't see any talk about 10.5 ("Siamese") - unless there's some major radical change that will require every application writer to change their app (and we all know how many times that's worked: the PowerPC transition, Carbon... and how many time's it failed: OpenDoc, early versions of OS X (which required all application developers to write in Cocoa/Yellow Box), and the original Copland(?).

To another topic: Earlier I mentioned about Apple charging 10 cents for "commercial podcasts." Except this requires micropayments, which are fun (from the technical - I can only imagine - and, from what I've heard, the financial aspects as well.). If I was Apple I would solve this problem by selling a subscription, and not the individual episode. You pay $1, and get to listen to 10 episodes of the podcast you want. I suspect this is more likely than other methods, because Apple's obviously figured out the $1 "micro"payment business, I suspect they'll just use that model, instead of having to figure out the 10 cent payment business as well.

Sidenote: I thought the PS3 and XBox360's online gaming systems were going to have micropayments - spend 3 cents on special shoes for your favorite player on NBA Live 2007, things like that. If I'm right about micropayments (they are trouble/hard), perhaps Sony/Microsoft will route around the problem by becoming the bank: you buy 3,000 credits for $30, from Sony or Microsoft, and spend credits from that in-system account, not your real world bank account. Transactions become a simple matter of decrementing and incrementing accounts in a Sony/Microsoft database, accounts are balanced with real world financial institutions once a month (so a merchant, who accumulated 100,000 in-system credits, would log in on the first on the month to find their online account at zero-ish, and themselves about $1,000 richer in the real world.)

This method would only require 1-2 transactions a month (instead of an unlimited number), and doesn't require cooperation of large financial institutions. On the other hand, perhaps this method would mean declaring yourself a real bank, and having to submit to the practices of the federal banking rules (like PayPal has to do) - perhaps that paperwork makes this idea prohibitive as well.

Fun link for the historically interested: Wikipedia on Pink/Tangent