Hopefully they'll get one out the door. With a bigger trackball.

Probably around an hour, but it may stretch out some. THe time factor is critical in guessing what will be announced as Steve J has certain patterns:

First will be comments on how insanely great the Christmas quarter was - lots of numbers that will impress, but take up time.

Then he needs to kick off iLife 06 and iWork 06. iLife 06 will probably have some enhancements, plus Front Row. iWork 06 should have the suite filled out so AppleWorks can get the EOL it deserves.

All that will probably take half of the Keynote, maybe more if there is another new app to announce - which may be why Aperture was announced a few weeks ago.

Then, an only then, can we get to new hardware.

The iPod shuffle might have the 1 gig version moved to the nano - give that 10 minutes.

Now for the Mactels. PB, iBook, minis? All 3 are possible, but each takes time for Steve to talk about and lovingly show the audience. Each needs more than 10 minutes so we are going over the hour mark if all 3 are announced.

The Hardmac story on the iBook EOL ad today gives a lot of weight to the iBook moving to Mactel. If iBooks move I think PBs will as well. Both will have built in iSight. If you do the notebooks (which have the highest priority) the mini may, or may not make it.

Intel will have the single core chips ready for an April announcement and the low end "may" be a single core. The option would be to bring out the dual core minis now and then bring out a cheaper single core in April.

It all gets down to how much Steve J wants to stir the pot, and I think he wants to stir it big time. We'll know in 20 days.

Quote

Guest wrote:
Then he needs to kick off iLife 06 and iWork 06. iLife 06 will probably have some enhancements, plus Front Row. iWork 06 should have the suite filled out so AppleWorks can get the EOL it deserves.

<GASP!>
AppleWorks EOL? Never! AppleWorks is immortal. It's been around, in one form or another, for 22+ years as "Three Easy Pieces" on the Lisa; AppleWorks I, II, and III on the Apple II; AppleWorks GS on the Apple IIGS; ClarisWorks, ClarisWorks Office, and, finally, AppleWorks on the Mac. Venerable it may be, but for a good reason: it works. There is no other software for the Mac that is as versatile and as integrated, much less as cheap as AppleWorks.

iWork has a lot of potential, but it needs a good spreadsheet with flexible charting, a simple-but-flexible relational database, and a vector drawing program to make it Son of AppleWorks. These shouldn't be clones of Excel <GAG!> or Illustrator, but tailored to work well with Pages and Keynote. For example, in Pages, one should be able to "subscribe" to a chart in a spreadsheet, so that Pages would go to the spreadsheet and get the current chart. Mail merge and other database-to-word processor functions are critical. It would be really nice to have a "FileMaker Lite" that would work with Pages.

There are some software programs that do these tasks, like Intaglio (drawing), iList (database), and MarinerCalc (spreadsheet), but the total cost of those is well over $200. There's also Papyrus Office, which has word processor, spreadsheet, and relational database for $99. I haven't used it and don't know how well it does for page layout.