Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

The infamous iHype has been steadily growing in anticipation of Steve Jobs’s keynote on Monday at WWDC.

The Macworld offices are, evidently, very busy, with new rumours coming in left, right and centre. And this is not to mention the Apple rumour sites, whose editors must, judging by the number of rumours we’re seeing, be on forty caffiene tablets an hour.

Rumors include a tablet Mac, larger iPhones with 3G and GPS, 14-inch MacBooks with aluminium casing, and all manner of other goodies.

I have slightly different predictions:

• It is almost certain we will see a 3G iPhone, although I suspect the case design will remain largely unchanged. We’ll see, at most, an all aluminium and glass design - I severely doubt the authenticity of the iPhone with white plastic casing. We’ll see voice dialing, a revised home button which glows different colours when SMSes, MMSes, etc are received, 802.11n, and the actual launch of the 2.0 firmware and the App Store. O2 will also offer the iPhone on a pay-as-you-go plan in the UK, charging 11p a minute for each call and SMS, and offering free Internet access (3G, GPRS, EDGE and Wi-Fi with The Cloud).
• I suspect we may see new MacBooks and MacBook Pros next week. Both devices will be made completely out of aluminium, and the MacBook Pro will take on a more ‘brushed metal’ appearance, similar to the iMac. The MacBook will have a black surround around the screen, also similar to the iMac.
• The first features of Mac OS X 10.6 will be revealed. It’ll be called Cougar, and will focus heavily on polish and reliability. One of the most immediately obvious features is Fairy Dust, a new set of graphical transitions that occur when a window is minimised, an icon is undocked, etc. This will mean that the Genie effect is revised, and now causes the window to ’sink’ as well as warp into the Dock, and that when the Trash is emptied, the Trashcan will glow and the items inside will appear to explode. Cougar will also include a new Terminal, which allows users to switch, using a menu, between the Bourne shell, the Korn shell, bash, dash, csh, tcsh, and a new, Apple designed shell called crash (Completely Redesigned Apple SHell). It’ll also have native support for ZFS and ext2/3/4. The new graphical enhancements will give Cougar the slogan ‘everything that happens is a blockbuster’, and therefore the new intro movie will reflect that fact, flying around a maze of historic Macintosh models while Ed Welch’s theme tune to Blockbusters plays in the background - additionally, the new intro movie will reveal that OS X has finally been translated into Welsh.
• ‘One More Thing’ will be a new revision of the Mac Mini. It will include an all aluminium design, and will also have FireWire 800 on board, 802.11n, a SuperDrive, keyboard and mouse as standard, and a $200 discount off a 20″ Cinema Display.
• There will be one more iddy-biddy thing: there’ll be Blu-Ray SuperDrives for Macs, which can be ordered separately and installed by hand, or added as a build configuration option for an extra $300-ish.