ThinkRefresh

Everyone is giving their thoughts, so here is my premonitions, visions and fears.

Just a few more hours.

At the time of writing we are T minus 1 hour until the SteveNote begins, so this really is a last minute post. Sadly I am not lucky enough to be over in San Francisco, but I am contempt with MacRumorsLive for now, however Twitter is showing sounds of letting us down which is a real shame because they have been doing so well over the past few days.

The first images are coming in with the usual hidden banners and queues, but it seems this year nobody knows anything for certain. It's pretty obvious a 3G iPhone is coming so those news sites with "inside sources" are probably just hedging their bets on the off-chance that they are correct.

Apple really would be stupid not to release the 3G iPhone, and Steve will have to work really hard to woo the crowd round if there is no mention of it. I think he will be clever and keep everyone on the edge of their seats by leaving it until his "and one more thing" section.

Hardware

I think because the iPhone will be taking center stage in the keynote, hardware releases will be minimal. At a push I think we'll see some new MacBook Pros, which would make me a very happy chap (because I want a 15" MacBook Pro Air so much), but it is likely we'll see something more subdued like new monitors, or Mac Minis.

Ten Point Six

Steve (or Apple in general) will have thought long and hard about this one. I have no idea whether they will release the next OS to developers, but after Leopard being delayed, they will have put a lot of thought into whether this is the right time for it to be released or not.

The rumours of a simple security and stability release could be true, personally I find Leopard has worked wonders for stability but if Apple really want to pour salt on Microsoft's wound (Vista) it would be a good idea. Being a developer I know how important it is to look back and refactor your code, concentrate on bugs for a while and really make apps solid, so hopefully Apple sees this as a good time to do so.

One thing I have been wondering about for a while is Core 3D, Apple have always been criticised for bad gaming performance in the past, but if they wrote a super optimised framework (maybe OpenGL / DirectX compatible) for developing games, that would get higher frame rates than on Vista, they'd win over a large amount of gamers just from that.

With the rumors flying around about the new re-branded .Mac service, that could also be an integral part of 10.6, imagine having a fully portable OS, the odd application would need to be installed (e.g. Photoshop), but things like your email client, voip service, instant messenger, code editor, rss reader and numerous others could all be stored on a server, and simply downloaded from a server when you move to another computer that doesn't have them.

I know how much pain Neil went through upgrading the Leopard having to reinstall all of his applications, and that would all be solved by simply downloading them when he's rebooted in the new OS. It wouldn't just have to be applications either, I am a keen user of snippets in my code, so when I add one on my Mac Pro, the MacBook should really have them too.