thestormglass.com

If you follow me on any of the various social spamworks I’m sure you too were inundated in the last couple of weeks with the news that Apple announced the next version of OS X Mountain Lion, amongst other things. I’m not going to summarise the news, you know the Googles.

There’s enough info floating around now to make some stab in the dark guesses about what I expect to come out of Apple this year…

-  iPad: Widely rumoured, March 6th. You’ll just have to believe that this has been sitting in my drafts for a few weeks - When the first leaked images of the iPad case surfaced I picked the day that was exactly 4 weeks from then. Allowing for the Apple ‘4-week-pre-event-hype cycle’. Turns out I got pretty close, I picked Tuesday because it’s a traditional release day for Apple…That’ll teach me.

It’s quite early days in the life of the iPad, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see it follow a similar 2-year cycle as the iPhone. That means this is a ‘minor’ year - improvements on the current generation without major redesign, almost indistinguishable: think 3G->3GS, 4->4S.

- WWDC: June 11-15. Apple set the stage last year for what people should expect from WWDC: lots of software announcments. Mountain Lion, iOS 6 preview, more on iCloud.

Edit 13/06/12 - Got the dates right and most of the content. I had no idea about MacBooks, very happy to see the retina display has arrived for the Mac.

- iPod’s of most persuasions: September-ish. I feel like we’ve seen the last of big iPod events and I’m betting there is no event this year. Expect a catchy tune coupled with an advertising blitz. New colours for nano and shuffle. I don’t see how they could make the touch any thinner, but anything’s possible in the land of Oz…err…Cupertino. The classic will survive another year, much to the dismay of people that don’t want to carry 40,000 songs around everywhere with them. 

- iPhone 5: October. I think Apple have changed the cycle for iPhone, replacing the iPod in the pre-holiday prime time slot. Moving the iPhone hardware announcement away from WWDC means it gets laser focused attention. Which is important because this is a ‘major’ year of the iPhone - redesign, visually distinguishable from the previous generation: think iPhone->3G, 3GS->4.