These are my predictions for next week’s Apple event, and also announced in this order.
-New version of iLife/iWork.
-iPhone OS 4.0. Won’t be available until June for current iPhone users, will be included on new iPhone released in June/July.
-iPad. It won’t be called iSlate or iTablet. The names aren’t “Apple” enough. A slate is an too unrefined to be associated with an apple product, and tablets are pretty much defined as those awful things with a stylus running Windows XP Tablet Edition. Apple will not use either of those names. That’s why I believe iPad is the name, or, at the very least, it won’t be iSlate or iTablet.
The tablet will be 10.1″ with a multitouch display, of course, and it will run a kind of hybrid OS X/iPhone OS that will be somewhat locked down. It will allow syncing with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse, but will not have a USB port for legit installation of a real OS (like full-fledged Snow Leopard or Windows 7) on it.
Steve Jobs will say “it’s just fantastic” and “we really love it” and “it will revolutionize the touchscreen computers as we know it.”
-Philip
I really hope your wrong on your predictions about the lack of a USB port. But with what they’ve done in the past I bet your spot on.