I think there are two people who care about predictions.  The first is all the pundits and columnists who want to put on the magic god/steve Jobs hat and pretend that they are running the company.  (this category includes the people who have such an experiance vicariously by reading them).  The second category is the day-trader types (who seem all to populous in the TMO world) who want to try and make money buy guessing what apple’s “big keynote” will do to stock price.

Shawn King from Mac Life: Who Cares?

Now, with that being said, here are my predictions for WWDC….

HAHAHA! I love it! I know the feeling—as much as I really don’t care to know what is coming up, I get caught up in predictions as a conference nears, too. can’t help it.

Great predictions, too.

Scene 1: Shawn King, exhibiting common sense, reminds everyone what baseless speculation is worth.

Scene 2: Angry trolls from Gizmodo’s comment threads show up to offer their customary insights.

Scene 3: Ned Beatty summons Shawn to a dark conference room for an angry lecture about the need to preserve the illusion of speculative Apple product excitement for the sake of hack tech writers’ continued employment.

“Why me?” Shawn asks.

“Because you’re on the Internet, dummy,” replies Beatty.

This bit I’m not so sure about:

new iPhones that will be treated as the Second Coming.

By a few, maybe, but I think Apple will show off a new phone with some decent improvements, and the typical reaction will be: “Is that it? But I want it to do this. And that. And that. And this. Oh, and the battery life should be twice as long.”

Apple will announce a release date and a price (US$129.00) for Snow Leopard. No one will care.

I care about 10.6. Haven’t you followed news of its development? It’s going to be substantially faster than Leopard.

Why make predictions if you really hate them?  I am mature enough to simply take a wait and see position.

As for Snow Leopard if all of my research bears out, this is a major step forward in the OS wars.  Leopard, as is, is feature ladened.  It is nice to see a different approach to the mating of OS to hardware.  For the users with Core 2 Duo Intel boxes we should see significant improvements in how our computers perform.  This is the update that should allows users to extend the life of their current equipment.

OUtside of Snow Leopard, the rest is of no interest to me what so ever.

I’m happy for anything interesting that Apple may announce, whether the blogging public or the tech press seem to care. Given their track record for the past bunch of years, I’m fairly confident that they’ll deliver some smart ideas in a very smart way. That’s good for the gear I rely upon, and it’s good for the shares of Apple I own.

I care.  I find it all very exciting.  Being an Apple investor, any good news that boosts share price is certainly interesting to me.  I’ll be using Snow Leopard eventually, but I’ll most likely be getting it with a new computer, but the $129 cost wouldn’t be such a bad deal if it runs faster and is stable.  I hope the ChiPhone is announced for China Unicom.  130 million subscribers is nothing to sneeze about.  If a fraction of those users buy ChiPhones, that’s just more money in the bank for Apple.  To tell the truth, I can hardly wait and I’m just itchin’ to get more and more information.  Rumors included.

I expect the news media to say the new iPhone and Snow Leopard are boring, since those media techies are just jaded pundits.  No company can come out with a revolutionary new product every year.  Apple doesn’t target sales to those type of people, so that’s too bad for them.  Most of the iPhone users will be very happy with even a mildly upgraded product and that’s what matters most to Apple.  High sales and customer satisfaction.

Steve will be a part of the keynote .. but not attending in person at Stage ...
Phil will be interrupted by an incoming phone call. A video phone call from Mr Jobs ... thats my “prediction” ...

Shawn King = tool. I stopped listening to what he had to say years ago.