Bunch of Keys

Off to watch St. Steve's Macworld Keynote address soon.

These things tend to follow a fairly predictable template:

Steve comes out and a great roar rises from the assembled masses. Then he does a bit on hardware and new machines (he's probably going to talk about the PowerMac desktop line, though he might talk about the iMac). After that is a bit about OS X (these things are always shot through with references to 'massive' sales numbers). He might get Phil Schiller on stage at this point to rally the troops a bit. After that, a series of guest speakers get paraded on stage. Probably some marketing VP from Adobe, someone from Microsoft's Mac Business Unit, a game programmer, maybe (but not likely) someone from Quark. After this (or perhaps during the middle of the long parade), he's gonna talk about the XServe; when he does that, he's probably going to talk about the XServe's RAID drive unit (ps -- expect to see faster XServes). Then he's gonna talk about the iApps -- iMovie, iCal, iChat, iTunes, etc. The rumor on the web seems to be that they're going to be charging for upgraded versions of the software. If there are going to be upgraded versions of the software, then they'll spend some time demoing it. This is also the logical time to discuss .Mac. Incidentally, it seems to make sense that .Mac would incorporate some kind of blogging tool, though I don't think that's going to happen this time around. Then he's going to talk about the portables, the iBook and the PowerBook. I wouldn't be surprised if they incorporate Bluetooth in new revisions. And he's going to wrap up with the desktop platform that he didn't start with (most likely the iMac/eMac).

Will there be a "One More Thing"?

Hard to say. Rumors about this keynote have been kind of thin on the ground, which either means that nothing spectacular is coming out or something really spectacular is coming out.

The safe money is on nothing spectacular coming out.

Oh, and it seems that I left out the iPod (and rumors of another iDigitalLifeStyleDevice) and the displays. If there are new displays, those will probably come either first or close to the top of the keynote.

Just my guesses. We'll see how accurate I've been in a few hours.