MacWorld 2005 Rumour Round Up
With MacWorld 2005 coming up on 10 January 2005 at the famed Moscone Centre, San Francisco, USA, informed mac fanatics are busy fuelling the rumour mill despite Apple’s latest attempts to deter intellectual property leaks within their Cupertino Fortress.
Macriot rounds up the latest rumours to fill the Internet and keep potential Apple buyers keeping their money in their pockets until MacWorld 2005.
Known or declared products to be previewed at the upcoming MacWorld 2005 include:
- flash memory-based mp3 player ala iPod
The latest rumours to come out from the rumour mill:
- an inexpensive ‘headless mac’, similar to the smaller form factor PCs
- “The new Mac is said to be incredibly small and will be housed in a flat enclosure with a height similar to the 1.73 inches of Apple’s Xserve. Its size benefits will include the ability to stand the Mac on its side or put it below a display or monitor. Apple has been working on the low-end Mac for almost a year, sources report. Indications are Apple has been working mostly on finding the right mix of price, performance and features that would motivate Windows users to consider a Mac, and less on the actual engineering of the product. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to design a bare-bones PC,” said one source familiar with the project. “What it takes is a team of marketing and software experts to find the right mix to convince Windows users to buy a Mac at a price that is not much more than the cost of an iPod.”
- an attempt by Apple to produce their own solution to Microsoft’s Office, dubbed iWork ’05
- “The suite will include Keynote 2 as well as a word processor named Pages, once known as Document… iWork ’05 will use a software serial number, require a 500MHz system or better, run on Mac OS X 10.3.6 or later, and will likely come with most new Mac models.”
- updates to the current iLife’04 digital lifestyle suite, dubbed iLife’05
- minor update, iTunes 4.7.1
- update, iPhoto 5
- update, iMovie 5 HD, upport for high definition video, MPEG-4, and the 16:9 aspect ratio
- update iDVD 5, one-click copying of DV tapes to DVDs; support for dual-layer DVD media; burning directly from an iPhoto library
- GarageBand 2 update, additional instruments and possibly new loops
- Keynote 2, possibly addition of newer transitions
In addition, mac rumour sites have also reported the possibility that Apple plans to sell software and extend discounts to .Mac members using the Software Update feature built into Mac OS X 10.3, Panther.
Looks like its going to be another exciting year for mac users and soon-to-be mac users.
If you missed the last MacWorld keynote speech, check it out at Apple’s Quicktime site and get a clue.
