WWDC 2008 Rumor Round Up: 6/5/08

June 5th, 2008

Fur is flying heavy so I’ll just mash all the iPhone 3G rumors and WWDC rumors into one post.

First Photos Of WWDC Lobby: Two banners, one touting OS X Leopard as the world’s most advanced operating system, and OS X iPhone as the world’s most advanced mobile platform. These two statements may explain the two Golden Gate bridges shown in the WWDC invite. It could be as simple as saying, if you are an OS X developer, you have two great platforms to develop for – hence the two bridges going off from one location.

AmTech: 50% Chance Of New Apple Tablet: Silicon Alley Insider floats a rumor that Apple may introduce a tablet device that is a hybrid of a Mac and an iPod Touch. I’m skeptical of this, and while I think eventually such a device will appear, it won’t until MultiTouch is a standard feature of OS X and the tablet runs full OS X – as in, a new MacBook form factor. I don’t think all that will happen next week.

Apple’s .Mac To Be Renamed “MobileMe”: Sounds good to me. This rumor got started because of someone digging around in the iPhone 2.0 SDK, finding the string MOBILE_ME_SERVICE_NAME. It may have new “push” functionality for applications to support the new iPhone, and Apple may give new iPhone purchasers a discount.

I had a .Mac account but didn’t find it terribly useful, so any revamping on the part of Apple to coax me back into paying a yearly fee would be very welcome.

All Aluminum MacBooks: Certainly possible.

iPhone “App Store” To Fire Up Monday: Makes sense.

Forbes Has Pictures Of Boxes: Speculating they contain the new iPhone.

10.5.4 Coming Real Soon: Big reason for the update is to fix an Adobe bug regarding saving Adobe CS3 files to a networked volume, and support for the revamped .Mac service rumored to be called “MobileMe”.

Apple Will Announce 10.6, “Snow Leopard” Which Drops PowerPC Support: Apple may preview 10.6, a maintenance upgrade which reportedly won’t add any major new features but will be Intel only. This update will show up in January 2009 and it’s implied all future upgrades will be Intel only, leaving all those folks with PowerPC based Macs (G4, G5) unable to get the latest and greatest. I’ll post more thoughts about this rumor later, but the more I think about it, it makes sense, especially if one extrapolates out to 2010 as the first major “Intel-only” upgrade post-Leopard. Moving to Intel includes getting user base transitioned as well.

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