What to expect at Macworld Expo 2008

When Steve Jobs hits the keynote stage at the 2008 Macworld Conference and Expo on January 15, he will face a ballroom full of bloodshot eyes, a sea of journalists, analysts, and bloggers knocked loopy by the culture shock of going to sleep in Vegas (where the Consumer Electronics Show was just held) and waking up in San Francisco. Talk about your tough crowd.

Fortunately, Jobs doesn’t need to kick into charisma overdrive to capture minds, hearts, and wallets. This year’s conference is already a banner event, a coming-out party of sorts for a Mac platform that has seen its biggest evolutionary kick since the demise of the original Mac OS. The combination of OS X Leopard and new Macs based on Intel’s Penryn CPU will help Mac outsiders remember that Apple sells more computers than phones.

iPhone, take 2

What will happen this week? Only Steve Jobs knows for sure, but here’s my best guess.

Although Leopard and Penryn have pushed the Mac to dizzying heights and should thus gain some stage time, the Macworld Expo keynote will still go heavy on iPhone and iTunes. And this time, the hype will be justified. eBay will be awash in mint-condition, used iPhones the day that Apple ships the new model that links to AT&T’s fast 3G network (in the U.S.). With the speed of the 3G cellular data network, lots of RAM space for cached maps, and a close partnership with Google, iPhone could blast a tunnel through the in-car navigation market. CES was packed with navigation newcomers, but none has the hook of iPhone’s multi-touch interface, much less the capability to make phone calls and purchase music from iTunes.

Another indirect but even farther-reaching benefit derived from the faster cellular network is iTunes Tagging. When listeners with compatible receivers are tuned into terrestrial and satellite radio stations that have licensed iTunes Tagging, they can purchase music that catches their ear with a button press. This will see its greatest uptake among users of Mac and PC iTunes, but iPhone owners could have the song downloaded before the radio is done playing it. No more trying to figure out the title of a song from the words in the chorus.

iPhone’s support for native applications will see its official debut in February, but third parties are undoubtedly already on board. If Apple doesn’t take up navigation, the likes of Telenav and TomTom surely will. Voice-over-IP would make a great keynote demo, and with native application support, Apple might not have to write it in-house.

Do pre-show announcements clear the stage for new notebooks? Apple always gets what it considers to be its lesser product announcements out of the way just before Macworld Expo so that Steve Jobs can focus on the high-percentage pitches in his keynote.

The pre-keynote rollouts for 2008 are Apple’s specialty machines: the Mac Pro desktop/workstation and Xserve rack-mounted server. Both have been reworked for Intel’s quad-core Penryn family Xeon CPUs, nicknamed Harpertown. Mac Pro buyers can now get 8-core systems for about $1,200 less than before, and the Harpertown Xserve is the first 8-core server Apple has ever sold. Both systems also support significantly faster front-side bus and memory speed. This sort of performance kick might go unnoticed by most home and mainstream commercial users, but Mac Pro and Xserve buyers are going to love it.

With the power user, workstation and server Mac announcements out of the way, Apple has room on the Macworld Conference and Expo keynote stage for new notebooks. The story there isn’t necessarily limited to Penryn. AMD recently announced its ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series GPU (graphics processing unit) for notebooks. Among the new GPU’s attributes are improved power efficiency, PCI Express 2.0, and direct HDMI output. The new ATI GPU has one other feature: on-chip decoding of HD and Blu-Ray DVD content. It may be a long shot for this Macworld Expo, but there is a high-def DVD-equipped MacBook Pro on the near horizon.

What to do after the keynote Those Macworld Conference and Expo Attendees who don’t fly home after the keynote will be treated to a packed schedule of sessions targeting audiences from home users to scientists and IT professionals.

Macworld Expo’s organizers — IDG World Expo, which has the same parent company as InfoWorld — have also managed to pack the exhibit hall. Attendees will find familiar faces such as FileMaker Pro, REALbasic, and the venerable BBEdit programmer’s editor, but they’ll also see Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Xerox, VMware, Parallels, Iomega and, of course, Microsoft.

Next to Leopard, Office 2008 for Mac will be the best-selling software for the Mac this year. It’s not only the first native version of Office for Intel Macs, but Microsoft’s first Office designed from scratch for OS X. The Mac faithful may outwardly jeer Microsoft for taking four years to catch a clue, but they’ll be buying Office along with all other commercial Mac users. Office 2008 will be just one of many new products showing at Macworld Expo that don’t need Steve Jobs to sell them. They’ll sell themselves.