I know its a bit late, seeing as the MacWorld Keynote is tomorrow morning, but figure I’d get my MacWorld predictions in under the wire.

With the announcement of the upgraded Mac Pro’s coming last week–just the sort of thing they normally annouce at Mac World–I’ve been scratching my head a bit about what WILL be annouced next week.

Furthermore, I’ve been wondering what the several hundred iPhone and Leopard engineers have been working on lately. I’m surprised it has been so quiet, and I suspect that it will be something pretty big.

In general though, I think it will be “All About the iPhone”. The SDK will be released, I expect that a number of developers have been working with Apple behind the scenes to insure that there will be a couple really cool applications that are launched to give people and idea of what is possible.

I also think that they will be announcing (and probably releasing) a MAJOR iPhone OS update that will include a lot of improvements and refinements of the 1.0 stuff that was released over the summer.

I suspect that part of the iPhone SDK, and part of the effort to help adoption rates, and allow people to test-drive the iPhone apps, we will be able to run the apps on Leopard-based Macs, possibly as dashboard widgets.

I am thinking that the Apple TV will probably get a major facelift–and it needs it. The home-theater / media center marketplace is almost exactly in the shape now that the cellular phone market was last January. There are a smattering of product offerings from various vendors–all of which are too technical or just don’t work well. Microsoft has a product that is decent, but not fantastic, and is encumbered with a lot of DRM BS (check back for a future blog posting about this).

I think Apple has been thinking about the living room quite a bit, and probably will be making big efforts to tie in the digital lifestyle components. Perhaps even a Cinema Display for the home theaters–perhaps even with a built-in Apple TV unit.

A lot of folks are talking about an ‘ultra-portable’ Mac. I’m not 100% sure it is going to be announced or released. I give it a 50-50. I do think that all the portables will get a speed bump, at a bare minimum.

More likely (and perhaps more interestingly) I think that all the portables will have either Edge or perhaps WiMax wireless capabilities built-in. This ties in a bit with what I’m predicting about the iPhone apps working on the regular Macs–access your stuff anywhere! There is even a possibility that the desktops will support the enhanced long-distance wireless stuff as well, but more likely it will be optional upgrades on the new Macs.

The iMac line will also get speed boosts, and probably price drops as well. I certainly hope so as I’m planning on buying a new iMac within the next 4 weeks.

So to wrap up, here are my predictions in a concise format:

• Several New iPhone Apps
• Major iPhone OS Update
• New Apple TV
• New Apple HDTV Cinema Display for Home Theater
• New Wireless capabilities in the portables (and possible desktops)
• Portables will get Speed Bump / Price Drop
• iMacs will get Speed Bump / Price Drop

We’ll see how I do next week!

On a side note: Apple stock is down a bit lately (170 this weekend, ~179 today), now is the perfect time to buy some stock if you have the means. I think that it will be back to 200+ by the end of the month and probably at 220 by the end of Q1.