OSX:Punditry — Four Options From Apple in September — Unexpected!

We all believe that Apple will be mak­ing some changes in September after recent com­ments at the fin­an­cial announce­ment indic­ate sub­stan­tial costs for a new product. I have been giv­ing this some thought, and here the four things that I think will happen.

• AppleTV add new soft­ware and NAS functionality
• iTunes Subscription service
• Announcements on upcom­ing MacBook and MacBook Pro updates
• An iTab­let device that is pitched as a Kindle, pos­sibly in con­junc­tion with Amazon

AppleTV with NAS — Home Storage Server — pos­sibly also wireless

Apple has com­mit­ted to to deliv­er­ing movies to con­sumers by the Internet and we have the AppleTV which is stead­ily mak­ing its niche.

And we have the Time Capsule which is an external stor­age device, com­monly used by most Mac users for Time Machine Backups over their wire­less. Currently the max­imum capa­city is 1GB, and already many iMacs are over­flow­ing this. Time Machine needs a much big­ger backup drive than the drive in your machine.

But it doesn’t quite go far enough, to put a full home com­puter sys­tem together we need the Airport Extreme, AppleTV and Time Capsule. Why have three sep­ar­ate items ? Why not attack the home com­put­ing mar­ket in a full frontal ?

My pre­dic­tion is for Apple to release product that has a NAS server that provides multi-​​disk stor­age with func­tions sim­ilar to Drobo /​ Netgear etc but also the AppleTV soft­ware will be built in to the units. It may or may not, also have the Airport Extreme wire­less built in as well.

It will prob­ably use up to four 2.5“in laptop style disk drives to save power, keep the noise down and you will be able to hot swap them. Think some­thing like the Drobo. It will have a large form factor of about a DVD player to fit into your TV cab­inet because it needs to vent the hot air without using fans.

This would then be the Home Server that is the holy grail of com­puters. This has been much talked for many years, and Microsoft has been try­ing to do this for years (and fail­ing miser­ably). The level of integ­ra­tion between all the com­pon­ents is the suc­cess factor and what Microsoft has not been able to over­come. Any Mac com­puter would auto­mat­ic­ally and seam­lessly integ­rate in the same way that all Apple equip­ment does today.

Keep in mind that the iPhone could be the Remote Control for this sys­tem, look at the Remote Control App that can remote con­trol iTunes on your Mac right now. Imagine using that to remote con­trol a Home Server ? Yep, easy isn’t it.

iTunes Subscription Service

I think Apple wants a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice but licens­ing from the major music labels has not been pos­sible. I think that deal has been put together where Apple makes a huge one off pay­ment to the labels (who are cash poor right know, espe­cially EMI) to bring them to the table.

The Music labels keep their DRM using Apple Fairplay, but the con­sumer pays a fixed amount per month for all the music they want. Apple has now proven that they can do a micro­pay­ments sys­tem by vir­tue of the Apple Store selling iPhone Applications and the pay­ment angle, which will have been prob­lem up until know, is solved.

This is one of the drivers for the Apple Home Server, because people will down­load a lot more music and want to store it. We have seen other music sub­scrip­tion ser­vices say this, that people down­load a lot of music.

An iKindle

The Kindle from Amazon has proven that a port­able book reader can work. The iPhone has proven that Apple can make and mar­ket port­able devices, and of course the iPod need no introduction.

Look for a joint part­ner­ship between Apple and Amazon to sell an iKindle. Amazon will get their shop­ping plat­form built in to the device AND iTunes (thats is their win) to attack new oppor­tun­it­ies with cus­tom­ers. Apple gets access to Amazon’s book con­tent and can eas­ily take the iKindle global. I think that Amazon will struggle to glob­al­ise the Kindle, and part­ner­ing with Apple makes sense.

Updated to Notebooks and Mac Mini

We will prob­ably see announce­ments about new Intel chip and chip­sets to be released before Christmas. No big deal, just hard­ware incre­ments along the line of the Intel roadmap.

I expect the Mac Mini to get new announce­ment for Christmas, for those people switch­ing from Windows but can’t afford, or under­stand, why they would buy a MacBook. Look for a big mar­ket­ing pro­gram attack­ing the ‘beige boxes’ with Mac Minis i.e. keep the key­board and screen but get your MAC experience.

Wrap Up

There you go. Some of it might be wish­ful think­ing, and things that I want, but hey, I can dream a little.

I am hold­ing on to my cash right now, and wait­ing to see what September brings. I am hop­ing to pick up a Mac Mini as an emer­gency backup for my MacBook Pro, and a Time Capsule for easier backup. I will wait to see if my pun­ditry is cor­rect before I cough up the bucks.

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