Macworld Expo preview

There have been more anticipated shows in terms of new products from Apple, but no Macworld Expo to date will rival the splendor of ’07. This will be a party, a celebration of Apple’s swift transition from PowerPC to Intel and its successful campaign to get platform buy-in from customers, developers and users of other x86 platforms. Apple’s client systems will begin their voyage from boutique tech and business couture to a brick-and-mortar merchandising phenomenon and a share stealer. iPod’s success is the model for Mac’s crossover to the mainstream.

Apple is shamelessly evangelizing the daylights out of Intel Mac to third parties, reaching around the small and loyal base of Mac developers, resellers and peripheral makers to roll out the red carpet for bigger vendors from the PC side of the world. Apple’s message to software and hardware players is that a vendor that manages to associate itself with the Mac brand and image scores automatic differentiation: “Good enough for Mac users.” That triggers a reflexive cynicism even in me, but Mac buyers traditionally eschew the generic stuff that’s merely accidentally Mac-compatible. Also, there’s margin in the Mac. Every Mac and everything you plug into it has one price, the list price, and buyers are okay with that. I expect to see repackaging of PC peripherals in Mac silver, with minimal font panel controls and software front-ends that have the Mac GUI style.

I had declared as a certainty that Leopard, the next major release of OS X, will ship at the conference. I’m less sanguine about that now. I haven’t been contacted for an executive briefing, which suggests to me that Apple new product announcements at the show will be of the non-bombshell variety. Or perhaps it’s my cologne.

Macworld Expo exhibitors will have Vista idling in windows on their booth Macs just to attract attention. But if anyone showed up selling copies of Vista, nobody would buy. Vista on a Mac is like a bear on a unicycle: It’s embarrassing, and yet you can’t look away. Windows XP on a Mac is more rational, and for those who need it, there are now three ways to teach a Mac to do Windows: VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and Apple’s own Boot Camp. There are latest, greatest versions of all three are in public beta.

To clear your palate of Windows, a prevailing theme in Steve Jobs’ keynote and in the exhibition halls will be the clean sweep of Universal Binary (Intel and PowerPC-native) releases of commercial and open source software. Microsoft, one of the last hold-outs, will show up with its Universal port of Office for Mac, which draw applause when it’s shown on stage.

My great hope is that Xserve RAID with support for SATA and serially-attached SCSI (SAS) will make its premiere. A 14-bay Xserve RAID would have a maximum capacity of 10.5 terabytes, and Steve loves to put big numbers in his keynote slides. Being able to move drive cartridges between Xserve and Xserve RAID is a capability that Mac server users haven’t had since Xserve G4; it’ll be nice to be able to buy one stack of drives and divvy them up amongst servers and arrays according to need.

Apple is going to amp up its .Mac service. Users willingly pay $99 per year for the kinds of capabilities that one gets for free with the Yahoo services bundled with AT&T DSL. Apple’s secret sauce will be the hooking of .Mac services into rich (non-browser) applications.

I have a feeling that Apple is going to set up deals with broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) and cable content providers (like ESPN and HBO) to stream quasi-HD on-air and pay per view programming in real-time. Broadcasters want broadband TV, but they’re frustrated by the lack of progress on delivery standards and dead set against doing it themselves. Apple’s copy protection is trusted, and every Windows PC and Mac in the universe is already equipped as a receiver.

In related news, the 30-inch Cinema Display is going to get a lot smaller. How big will the new Cinema Display be? As big as Apple thinks the market can stand. I don’t see anything Mac-worthy hiding among the brandless big screen LCD TVs at Wal-Mart, but panel manufacturers have obviously gone big. I know that NEC is bringing hybrid consumer/desktop monitors to Macworld.

Not every Mac is ready for the big screen; the tiny Mac mini, which would otherwise be the perfect home theater and boardroom presentation component, has a fast dual-core CPU strapped to a two-legged dog of an Intel integrated graphics controller. That might call for a new compact media-savvy Mac.

We’ll see a refresh of iLife and iWork, Apple’s consumer and business productivity suites, respectively. Within the iWork suite, Apple’s Keynote presentation software is tops, but its Pages word processing/page layout software hasn’t drawn Keynote’s accolades. However, Pages has the potential to rock out as an accessible, affordable WYSIWYG tool for creating business-grade Web content. It could also qualify as Word Lite with the addition of automatic spelling correction.

The image of a Bluetooth iPod is stuck in my head. It’s hazy beyond that; will Apple sell wireless headphones? Will iPod sync automatically whenever you wander close to your Mac? Can you use an iPod as a Mac remote control? Who knows, but there’s a Bluetooth transceiver in every Intel Mac, and its capabilities are overkill for a wireless keyboard and mouse.

One thing I know for certain is that Macworld Expo’s exhibit halls are packed. The show is at San Francisco’s sprawling Moscone Convention Center, not the compact Moscone West. My calendar is packed with briefings from third-party vendors, and they’re still calling on the Friday before the show. As if on cue, there goes my phone again. We’ll talk again.