Rui CarmoWithout further ado, here are my 10 unsurprising predictions for next year:
- There will be a new iPhone, and more wannabe clones
- There will be a new iPad, and more wannabe clones
- There will be some new Apple gadget for news sites to gush over
- Lion will come out and bring back the simplest possible tiling window management strategy to our desktop with a vengeance (i.e., full-screen)
- Some other hitherto unassailable corporation from the heyday of the PC industry will be bought out and re-branded
- Yahoo will shutter another random property, further tripping themselves up
- Google will launch six to seven new shiny things which will be heralded as the next best thing since sliced bread by the cloud computing pundits, and quietly shelve two or three that were actually useful
- Microsoft will plow ever onwards, incrementing version numbers of everything and (eventually) pissing off Intel until they actually lower their prices to reasonable, non-highway-robbery values
- Nokia will keep dithering where it regards their OS strategy
- Everyone will keep going on about how X should buy Y and turn them into a profitable business, when X is actually in deeper trouble than people want to realize
And yeah, next year is going to be a lot tougher, given that no matter how frantically the industry tries to emulate Apple there will be severe economics constraints pretty much everywhere (and, of course, here in my neck of the woods). I don’t anticipate that great a year, and find it prudent to keep my expectations low (at best).
Regardless of that, one can always wish for better. Me, and as far as Apple is concerned, only intend to wish for three things:
- A price cut on SSDs that will bring the 11” MacBook Air within the “I won’t feel guilty about getting one” price range
- A bona fide, full-featured Apple Remote Desktop client for the iPad (with Back to My Mac support) so that I can get rid of iTeleport - which is awesome in its own right, but lacks remote management integration and other niceties.
- An iOS update that lets me use a Bluetooth keyboard with the iPad properly - i.e., with Ctrl, function key and application switching support, all of which I need to use any VNC or SSH client sanely.
As for the rest of my wishes, they are mostly personal and real-life oriented. But I would like to wish all my readership a very happy New Year - let’s do epic, erm… stuff.