John Gruber has posted his predictions for Macworld Expo 2009. Among them are new monitors (long overdue), a new MacBook Pro and a demo of Snow Leopard. Gruber isn’t a rumour crazy, so you can take his predictions as ones coming from sense and an awareness of Apple.
A demo of Snow Leopard is what I’m gunning for. Not just for creative applications, but games. Let’s see what OpenCL can really do for titles like CoD 4 and ET:QW. It’d be great to have more visually appealing and modern games to see, but we’ll probably have to wait until Rage for that. Snow Leopard is all about improvement under the hood, so higher frame rates on existing and underpowered hardware are very welcome!
I’m wondering – just wondering – if there’ll be some mention of the new NVIDIA hardware that’ll most likely be in all of the new Macs. As I said in October regarding the 9400M and 9600M in Apple laptops:
Rene wouldn’t tell me about upcoming Apple products that will feature NVIDIA chipsets and GPU’s, but when I asked him if all Apple products (most importantly the iMac and Mac Pro) were going to feature NVIDIA chipsets and brand new GPU’s, he simply smiled and told me to wait and see. I think we’re going to see Apple move to NVIDIA hardware completely, definitely GPU’s. CUDA is going to play a huge role in Leopard. With a tighter integration of hardware, better drivers (Rene said that drivers for Mac OS X will definitely be improved) and a focus from Apple and NVIDIA, we’ll see huge performance boosts across the board, that with a bit of luck may give Mac gaming the steroid injection it needs.
There have been a few rumors floating around the net regarding what chipset will be in the new iMacs, pretty much split between Core 2 Quad or the new Core i7. It’d be great to see i7 in the iMac, but as a chipset it’s relatively new and is still expensive.
The iMac is a mid-range machine but it’s also the desktop Mac that most people are likely to purchase. The balance is a tricky one; limiting the performance and expandability of the iMac to pave the way for sales of the Mac Pro, but maintaining it as an affordable and powerful desktop. More likely the chipset in the iMac will be Core 2 Quad, but this is just my own take on the matter. I could see Apple releasing the i7 iMac, with the Mac Pro coming later in the year, but we’ll have to wait and see.
I questioned a source (complete with lamp and handcuffs) a few weeks ago regarding i7 in future Apple products and all I got was “no comment”. This isn’t a confirmation, but perhaps suggests the new chipset is in the pipeline.
Also this month is CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. Ballmer is talking, apparently about Games for Windows and Apple, which are probably unconnected to each other. Worth a watch, if only to see what the Windows camp are doing.
