Hi again. I thought it might be amusing to do a few predictions for Apple related announcements for the next six months to a year (hey it amused me anyway).

- Apple Media Centre Mac – 98%
After Steve’s “we hear you” comment and Apple’s interest in the movie delivery market, I think this is more or less a given. Bit annoying as I just bought a Mac Mini to do this but hey thats life

- Apple Phone – 60%
Still a bit sceptical on this, We would all have a OS X/Newton hybrid phone that synced naively with the Mac and had all the features and more of Symbian and PocketPC right. I just not sure that a) Apple would be able to pull it off and b) they want to and risk caniblising the iPod market. I’ll wait and see on this one, but I think my next phone is an HTC Wizzard.

- iPod business spun off into another company – 35%
If you had asked me about this three months ago would have given it a higher chance due to the business in Europe regarding DRM, but as France now seem to be capitulating and Apple have threatened to just pull out of those countries that oppose its DRM I think its less likely.

- MacOS X for anyone’s Intel PC – 50%
Apple is a hardware company and makes great software to sell their hardware, however the door that let hackers re-engineer some of the OS to let it run on third party platforms has begun to close with the removal of the Intel MacOS X kernel as OSS under the Darwin Project. You could argue that the Blind eye that was turned away from these clandestine portings has been focused because Apple are going to release OS X as a stand alone product = possibly as soon as Leopard. Four Apple Execs are taking to the stage at WWDC to demo Leopard, there’s the new datacentre recently purchased (to run the registration and support systems perhaps). Another factor is Microsoft’s inablility to ship Vista which has allowed Apple to do something cool with leopard and has sparked interest in the Mac in desperation by Wintel users.
We have seen this sort of play from Apple before, they milk the hardware switchers and then release the software, take the iPod which was Mac only for the start of its life in the hope that it would spark interest in the Mac platform and then released for Wintel to get the real numbers.

Apple has a long term strategy that it plays very close to its chest. I guess we will just have to wait and see.