Alex Stone

Just a heads up, I’ll probably tweet like crazy with @leighjhokie from 1PM EST  to about 3PM EST. So be ready for that.

That being said… here are my totally unwarranted and only slightly informed, but *just* a little more than most of you, predictions for tomorrow’s announcements.

iPhone for Verizon Everyone
Let’s face it. A lot of people aren’t happy with AT&T for various reasons. A lot of people don’t like Verizon either. To be honest, neither service is as good or as bad as someone tells you it is. Truth is, no one really loves their carrier. They’re basically bullies that lord their service fees over you because of how vital mobile communication has become to our society.

I have a theory, though! Apple is a company that likes to do things their own way. My guess is that the iPhone 4.0 OS (see below) will be able to suppor GSM, CDMA, and LTE networks and a new model of the iPhone will be released that can run on any carrier you choose to throw at it. The catch? That you’ll have to purchase the iPhone from Apple, directly, at a non-subsidized cost (think $400 for a 3G, about $600 for a 3GS). The upside is that you’ll be able to by your phone from a retailer and take it to whatever carrier you got. The SUPER AWESOME upside is that other handset makers will likely follow suit and we’ll finally enter a world where you can either bind yourself to a carrier for two years, or pay a little extra and be a free-roaming mobile user.

iPhone 4.0 OS Announced (But not Released until March-ish)
Apple usually announces the new iPhone OS before it’s available to the public so I expect the trend to follow for 4.0. I have no idea what will be in the new OS. My guess is better notification handling, more media codec support, MAYBE (but highly unlikely) Flash 10 support, some level of multi-tasking, improvements across all of the built-in apps, including the option to remove them.

Aperture 3
It’s coming and it’s going to be great. Tons of performance improvements and overhauled photo workflow.

Final Cut Express HD 2 (or whatever version we’re on)
Tons of performance tweaks, support for a wide variety of consumer cam formats, better AVCHD handling, and more timeline options. Maybe a price drop.

iLife ‘10 / iLife X
To go with the new Aperture and FCE upgrades, we’re likely to get a new iLife suite. iPhoto will get a ton of cool new features to better suite people using it to handle their iPhone libraries (separate the video from the photos better), iMovie will get a lot of the features coming to FCE HD, GarageBand will get a few upgrades, and the rest of the sweet will see minor upgrades.

iTunes gets renamed to something more appropriate
I love when iTunes gets updated. LOVE it. Back when the iLife suite was free, I only cared for iPhoto and iTunes. As centric as iTunes is to the Apple ecosphere, it’s really more than jukebox now. It plays movies, stores your apps, etc. etc. And of course, to accomodate the upcoming publication store, we’ll need a major overhaul on iTunes.

ALTERNATE PREDICTION: iTunes stays iTunes and the iTunes Store / App Store gets a new home in its own app that also becomes the home for managing your iPhone and iPod (touch or otherwise)

The “one more thing”, is no doubt the iTablet/iSlate
The perfect device to tie together the “digital lifestyle”/Apple ecosystem will be a 10”, fully multi-touch touchscreen tablet. It’ll play music, surf the web, send email, and basically do all the iLife stuff. My guess is it will be able to run on Verizon or AT&T -OR- you’ll have the option to go wifi-only. My guess is it will price around $600 - $700 depending on how much internal space you want on it and then if you opt for wireless connectivity, you’ll have your tablet plan on your preferred provider.