“We are anticipating that many of Apple’s laptop products will simply no longer have an optical drive of any kind but instead will have a multiple format flash reader slot and an iPod docking port. When docked, future iPods will have access to some notebook functions and be usable as a secondary display,” Rob Enderle writes for TechNewsWorld.
“With the market moving aggressively to laptops and Apple’s laptop numbers being particularly strong, expect most of the company’s [2006] design effort to be focused on making this new product stunning to look at and even more impressive to use. An instant-on feature, largely founded in Intel technology, will be common as will 802.11n and the elimination of the optical drive as mentioned above. A stronger tie-in to the ever more PDA-like iPod and stronger ties to iTunes like backend services should be present as well. This is where Apple will be taking its biggest gambles and, at least for now, those gambles look like good ones to me,” Enderle writes.
MacDailyNews Note: We hardly ever shut down our Apple PowerBooks. We just close the lid and they sleep. Open the lid and they’re “instant-on” in a sense already. So this is not that big a deal in portables; Macs have been “instant-on” for years thanks to Mac OS X. (We understand that “Sleep” isn’t “instant-on,” but our point is that for users it’s pretty much the same effect.)
Enderle continues, “As we have seen with the iPod, black is the new white. Expect Apple to begin the iBook’s color transition next year… PowerBooks will likely shift to a darker metallic or graphite finish to refresh the overall look and better mirror the more advanced image it has. The new PowerBooks line should also expand to the first 19-inch wide screen format product in the segment and the possibility of the first dual processor dual core laptop as well in this format.”
Enderle also predicts the future for Apple’s desktop lines and writes that he expects, “Apple to expand their line to include a 45-inch LCD display with LED lighting. The 45-inch LCD should come in below $5,000 and be more of an Apple showcase. They should have a 21-inch wide format for around $700, a 24-inch wide format for around $1,000, and a 32-inch wide format for around $1,900 in this time frame.”
Enderle concludes, “Overall, 2006 should be a very powerful year for Apple, but staying patient while we wait for the biggest product release since the original Mac will be almost impossible.”
Full article here.
Nary a disparaging word about Apple or the Mac platform from Enderle. While his predictions may or may not come true, this article’s tone is an interesting change nonetheless. We would like to see unique iPod integration into Macs. Apple should leverage iPod’s success as much as possible to make the Mac an even stronger logical platform choice for iPod owners.
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