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Cringley has come up with some great theories in the past. Too bad none of them have come true.

I would not put ANY weight on what he thinks will happen.

And the crystal ball says, or is it the Magic 8 Ball? I wish these analysts would quit speculating and building up anticipation in the market with no foundation. Apple innovates - it will likely be pretty cool; whatever it is. As long as it doesn't flop like MobileMe. Apple, like Coke - can survive one bad product; not two.

I don't believe that this makes any sense.

Aug 02, 08 - 10:34 am Comment from: Anonymous©

Okay, it's a possibility.

How about high-def video chat?

@Let the Speculation Continue

Do we know that MobileMe has flopped? Have people left the service in droves? Is it losing money?

No question the rollout has been very poor and many people have been inconvenienced but the thing is hardly Windows Vista. I think the Coke analogy is much more appropriate when looking at Vista than MobileMe. Let's wait ad see how MobileMe is performing six months after launch.

Aug 02, 08 - 10:56 am Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

"Apple, like Coke - can survive one bad product; not two."

Apple and Coke have both already had more than one bad product. MobileMe will be straightened out in due time.

MEH

iPhone doesn't do it for me.

Screen is too damm small, storage space is terrible, AT&T;/NSA/hackers combined with a insecure iPhone equals NO PRIVACY. Not to mention that EFI on Intel Mac's represents a serious invasion of privacy and security, but at least one can control it by controlling when they hook up to the internet.

Corporate Intelligence is BIG BUISNESS!!!

Imagine if you had your huge client and price list stolen?

How about automatic encryption for the iPhone like it is on OS X?

Anyone?

Apple?

Bueller?

Aug 02, 08 - 11:10 am Comment from: Wingsy

I don't think this is what Oppenheimer meant. When he says "...that our competition will not be able to match...", I tend to take his word for that. Since any company can purchase these codec chips then anyone could build the same thing.

I think it has something to do with Apple's recent purchase of PA Semi. A custom chip designed by Apple is exactly the kind of thing that competitors will not be able to match, at any cost. I'm thinking along the lines of system support chips that would greatly boost the speed of any Apple computer, or even a turbocharged iPhone/iPod that would further distance Apple from the rest of the pack in that area.

Go ahead, iCal me.

Aug 02, 08 - 11:13 am Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

Speaking of Coke, some of these flavors are a little strange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola variations:

Coca-Cola
New Coke (renamed Coke II)
Diet Coke (also known as Coca-Cola Light)
Diet Coke Plus
Coca-Cola C2
Coca-Cola Zero
Coca-Cola Cherry Zero
Coca-Cola Cherry
Diet Coke Cherry
Coca-Cola with Lemon
Diet Coke with Lemon
Coca-Cola Vanilla Zero
Coca-Cola Vanilla
Diet Coca-Cola Vanilla
Coca-Cola with Lime
Diet Coke with Lime
Coca-Cola Raspberry
Diet Coke Raspberry
Coca-Cola Black Cherry Vanilla
Diet Coke Cherry Vanilla
Coca-Cola Blāk
Diet Coca-Cola with Citrus (Lemon and Lime)
Coca-Cola with Orange (Out June 2007 in the UK)[68]
TaB (original Diet Coke, still available in some countries)
Passover Coca-Cola - a Kosher for Passover Coke made with pure cane sugar instead of corn syrup.

It doesn't seem fair that they make a version for Jews and not the Catholics. How about Coke Ripple?

In time they will come out with Coke Erect.
This variation will be laced with female pheromones and Viagra.

Aug 02, 08 - 11:18 am Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

Wingsy,

"Go ahead, iCal me."

Oh yeah, you have been soooo iCal'd mister!

What were you talking about anyway?

Aug 02, 08 - 11:24 am Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

Raving MacHead,

"Corporate Intelligence is BIG BUISNESS!!!"

I just heard about a new search BUISNESS called 'Cuil'.
Those Irish are strange.

Aug 02, 08 - 11:38 am Comment from: 84 Mac Guy

Interesting theory, but since Cringely is usually full of crap, the probability of it happening is probably in the sub 10% range.

I put my money on the one thing Apple can do quickly across their whole Mac lineup that will negatively impact their margins immediately, that is, lower prices.

Aug 02, 08 - 12:29 pm Comment from: Cubert

Video conferencing everywhere.

If AT&T;'s 3G network can handle it.

Aug 02, 08 - 12:34 pm Comment from: Cubert

@ Raving MacHead,

The new iPhone firmware has support for secure remote erase in case of theft.

Also, with all that EFI talk you sound like that other dude who posted about that stuff constantly a while back.

For Cringley, this is a pretty tame prediction. Usually he's way out there. And way wrong.

the prices for laptops are in a free fall, at least here in germany and i am not even talking about the eepc. apple has always managed to keep a higher asp thanks to better hardware-quality, superior design, brand-awareness and the osx. that was difficult enough but let to amazing groth-rates over the last 3-4 years when an average windows laptop was 1000 euros. but now they are 500 euros. i dont know the prices in the us but probably they have fallen as such. apple hast to lower their prices and add features that others can't match (which means higher costs) at the same time to outgrow the industry. i am pretty confident we will see amazing new macbooks, a macbook touch and new macbook pros at 10-15% lower price-points than today. the new $899 macbook will be available in september. ical me. (please i want to be icaled)

Aug 02, 08 - 01:48 pm Comment from: LinuxGuyAndMacProdigalSon

Once again Wingsy, You bring up the PA Semi connection. I think you are onto something big. This strategy would leave any copy cats and wannabe cloners stranded and just SOL.

Aug 02, 08 - 02:22 pm Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

ralph from berlin,

You do realize the consequences of being iCal'd, don't you?

Your comments are automatically forwarded to the FBI, or in your case the Bundeskriminalamt.

But, if that's what you want ...

Aug 02, 08 - 02:22 pm Comment from: cogitoergomac

@Raving Machead: "screen too small?" "Storage space too small?" On what planet? Except for me and two others, my company of 500 uses Blackberries, and every single one of them has a screen smaller and crappier than the iPhone. Not a one of them can hold as much as my iPhone. On top of that, our BBs are not encrypted, but they are--like the iPhone--wipe-able. When you have something inteligent to say, please send up a flare.

Aug 02, 08 - 02:49 pm Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

"When you have something inteligent to say, please send up a flare."

Unless you live in California.

Cringely was wrong when he made this guess more than a year ago, and he's still wrong today. For Apple to include an H.264 encoder in every Mac, they'd have to be convinced that enough of their users would need it to to justify the cost of the part. Most Macs have a CPU and GPU that are capable of decoding 1080i H.264 video signal already, and there just aren't that many Mac users who encode video to make it worth doing.

My company is working on H.264 encoder hardware for the Mac, and it would be a very good thing for us if Apple did this, since it would drive the H.264 adoption curve much faster, and we'd still be the company to go to if you wanted to do more than one stream at a time per host. I wish Apple would do this, but I don't see it happening.

-jcr

Yeah, this is stupid. Hell, current Mac's are fine with decoding H.264 1080p video, even without taking advantage of the H.264 support in ATI and NVidia chips.

The SOLE reason that we don't get HD movies on MacOS X [that it's limited to the AppleTV], is because Apple can't reasonably bolt the absolutely stupid amount of DRM-related code that Microsoft did for Vista, like with the stupid 'all loaded drivers must be signed by MS or you get SD output', or the multiple times a second "has the user physically modified any attached hardware" checks.

Surely they've got something better coming than this.

Aug 02, 08 - 07:39 pm Comment from: Olmecmystic

I think the Fingerworks multitouch input across the Mac product line, which would obsolete the 20+ year old keyboard and mouse input that every PC uses (copied), may finally be ready for prime time. It would also fit the bill of Oppenheimer's "no competitors would be able to match".

My two cents.

Peace.
Olmecmystic

Yuh, I think Apple would have installed Blu-ray on all their Macs if they were really interested in 1080p. 1080p is a niche- is everyone supposed to go out and buy new Macs, new 1080p TVs, and new AppleTV's? Just to get this high-def format that's really only worthwhile on +50" TVs?

Um, no. For the same reason Blu-ray is not flying off the shelves - the difference is just not that spectacular over 720p to justify buying all this new equipment. Chicken and egg- Blu-ray requires 1080p TV requires Blu-ray- no point having one without the other, or you are paying for extra resolution you can't use or see. It's stupid. How long are Blu-ray players going to be stuck at $400? As long as the industry's greed holds out- which is to say, forever.

They are going to kill their own market. Stillborn.

It's a great story, but my "product transition" guess is iPod Touch become the main ipod.

Other guesses would be sub $1000 macbooks again, or a lower cost tower.

But the touch going mainstream and perhaps replacing the nano (or having a touch-based nano), and maybe the classic would both impact margins AND be exactly the kind of evolutionary and strategic change that Apple continually engages in.

And the classic and nano being replaced by touch based, OSX devices is something we all KNOW will happen. It is just a matter of cost and when Apple will eat the margins (temporarily as they'll then hold their price points as their component costs continue to decrease.)

btw,these guys choose their words VERY carefully. He said "product transition". He did NOT say "new product."

serially commenting...

The more I think about it, iPod transition REALLY fits Mr. O's comments. It will be especially chilling on competitors. Think of it this way: the market leader in standalone .mp3 players KILLs the market for standalone .mp3 players. Whatever margins Apple eats, imagine how this affects SanDisk.

Even better is how it affects Zune... since MS in its great wisdom copied the ipod's lack of a standard OS as if that were a feature not a transitional necessity. WinMobile may suck, but at least it is a platform, which the Zune is not. So I expect we'll see MS dump the Zune in favor of a WinMobile-based hack and probably abandon its Zune users with the same grace it used to knife its "plays for sure" partners. I hadn't thought of this before... so I am suddenly giddy with anticipation.

And for other makers, while MS needs to get paid for every copy of Window/Win mobile/Win whatever, scale means Apple is amortizing its OSX development costs over a larger and larger bas. The marginal cost of OSX in an iPhone/iPod Touch? Zero (100% paid for in the R&D;expense line.)

Aug 03, 08 - 06:59 am Comment from: chaz

I too believe the product transition is somewhere in the Mac. I think the contract they are eating is somehow related to PA Semi.

@YAS

100% agree on the iPod. Something is going to happen here as well. Totally agree, with you and Ralph in Berlin, Apple has the opportunity to lower prices and should!!!!! Do you realize the wedge this drives between M$ and its "Partners". When Apple delivers a superior product at the same price, how could they compete? "Partners" go off writing their own software because they can't afford to pay M$!! Suddenly the monopoly begins to implode on itself! Apple has been content to rule the high-end of the market, waging a war of attrition on the bottom feeders, but truth be told, it could own the high-end market if it wanted.

Aug 03, 08 - 07:58 am Comment from: Denny

@John C. Randolph

Could this be something like a USB stick hardware encoder add on?

1080p is not going to lure early adopters back into the Apple store. At least not in droves. What a stupid idea. People who have 720p are unlikely to notice the difference between the two; in order to drop a bomb, I really think there needs to be something more compelling.

Actually delivering a reasonable catalog of movies would be more of a bomb. We still subscribe to netflix, because, well, the Apple TV in just not there content-wise. To penetrate beyond the fanboy market, Apple needs more content.

I think you may see some kind of home-folder-on-the iPhone situation, or perhaps home in the cloud situation with a more efficient streaming setup. Mobileme goes to 500GB online storage, and you have your music, photos, ect accessible from multiple devices and locations.

There are 3 products closely tied to this announcement. #1 is a new range of Monitors with HDMI input. The 2nd and 3rd are the Apple TV and the Mac Mini. High Def monitors scream for more than just pixels, they need connectivity. Numerous HiDef camcorders have HDMI out. Moving the Apple solidly into the living room will require some acceptance of non Apple products so the connections are a must. 1080P? Working in a computer workspace of 1368x720 isn't very pleasant, so 1080P resolution is needed. Why not take advantage of it elsewhere?
The 2nd and 3rd? The rumor is a convergence of Mac Mini and Apple TV. Apple's challenge there is to distinguish it from Windows Media Center pc's. The form factor and Apple's traditional UI expertise are a must.
The negatives? Family usage of a TV would imply that using the computer would interrupt its media chores and why spend an extra $600 or so on an Apple TV that asks to be stopped to check email? The market would primarily be singles or couples without children. The offset is that lots of people have a laptop to do the computing but would like an Apple TV with greater versatility (ripping music and video, video editing, more flexibility online).
The 4th factor, but much more niche oriented, is a new Mac Pro with HDMI in and out. If Firewire and HDMI and the output from FCP and FCE could feed directly into the H.264 encoder, how cool would that be?
How about a high end Mini with an externally accessible slide in HD bay for the new 320 and 500gb laptop HD's?

How is that something that the competition can't match?

@ Sir Gill Bates

In Germany they've got a Coke + Orange Fanta thing, which ain't too bad, called Mezzo Mix, actually made by Coca-Cola, too. A more local German variety of the same thing is called "Diesel" or "Spezi", but that sounds a little too close to Nazi/Speznaz for my liking...

Aug 04, 08 - 07:02 pm Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

Toljaso,

Back in the good old days people were happy to just drink regular Coke. I wonder if it was all the same recipe world wide or if varied from country to country?