Surprises in the apple

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. San Francisco time is the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and boy am I excited. There’s been a slew of rumors floating around as to what Steve Jobs is going to announce — the iPhone’s going to get official Apple sanction on third-party applications, which is really nice, but there’s also the possibility of 3G wireless (faster), larger hard drives (32gb), built-in GPS, video chat (moving the camera to the front), and possibly getting thinner. (I am so buying an iPhone as soon as the new ones are out. Besides, my current phone is battered and hashed. And I’m a sucker for geek toys.)

Other rumors include Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6, for more see Daring Fireball), Mobile Me (the renovation of .Mac, and Apple did buy me.com last week, so this is likely), and a Mac tablet of sorts. Along with a new MacBook Pro or something. Even if just one or two of these things are true, life in the Mac world will be good. Man, I can’t wait!

And for those non-Mac people who think all this hype is hogwash, well, you may be right (and you may not :)), but you have to admit that WWDC and MacWorld Expo are a heck of a lot of fun. It’s like Christmas. (The presents part of Christmas, that is. :)) There’s something giddy and goosebumpy about events like these — people care. Yes, Apple’s main goal is to make money. But we Mac people are a community, a family. And Steve’s got surprises up those black turtleneck sleeves. And both of those are what makes WWDC so exciting. Mmm.

I’d be interested to see some sort of compilation of statistics showing the plummeting rate at which world economic productivity grinds to a halt during Jobs’ keynotes.

As for me, I know I never get any work done while the RDF is activated.

Not sad to not be part of the Apple family anymore.

But have fun! Apple stuff is awesome, I just can’t afford to pay for the family bonding…

Well, we got 3G, GPS, and thinner, along with MobileMe and Snow Leopard (though Snow Leopard won’t come out for another year). Not bad. I can’t wait for July 11. And MobileMe is compelling enough now that I’m seriously considering it… (Still not all the way there, though. I’m rather fond of Gmail and Google Calendar…)

Connor: Haha, yeah, I was trying rather hard to get some coding work done, but I kept getting pulled back to Engadget’s site to do a refresh.

Hilary: The iPhone did become $200 cheaper today, you know. :P No, you’ve got a good point. Apple products do cost more, unfortunately. (But I don’t think the family feeling has to do with paying more than other people — in my view it’s a subculture that’s about the coolness of the toys and not the cost. In other words, you’d still have Apple fanatics even if Apple products cost far less than everyone else. Or at least I think you would.)