Keynote Frenzy

So begins a tradition that I usually spend either at Apple’s Reston, VA office [pdf] or online at #mobitopia watching the quicktime stream. This year I’ll be madly refreshing the dozen or so sites I mentioned the other day and I’ll also be lurking in #mercworld on irc.slashnet.org with the hopes that someone at the keynote has batteries long enough for “one more thing”

What I expect

• iTunes Flash – 1GB coming in at $149ish (which would be a great place to be: less than the mini butmore in cost and value than a 256 or 512 meg player for $100)
• A solid ship date for Tiger (and various demos) and mention of iWork.
• Talk of (and demos of) the Moto-Apple phone which is really just a mobile phone that can consume iTunes store stuff.
• Minor speed bumps in Powermacs, Powerbooks, iBooks, the 80gb iPod, and general shuffling of the iPod line.
• I expect Steve Jobs to say something along the lines of “Over the years we’ve brought you some of the best products on the planet. In 2005, we’re going to bring them to everyone else.”
• one more thing… the cheapmac. I hope the price point will hit $499 but I wouldn’t be suprised to see it higher.

What I don’t expect

• The G5 powerbook
• A tablet ibook
• Newton 2.0
• A major unrumored announcement

I’ll be updating this post throughout the day as information comes in, so stay tuned.

10:26AM EST: MacNN’s barebones Macworld coverage page is up.

10:29AM EST: Mac OS Rumors has a dedicated page for coverage.

10:50AM EST: MacMerc has gone Lite.

11:31AM EST: Erik points out ipod-shuffle.com, though it’s not registered to Apple.

11:44AM EST: This iPod Micro story is a fake..

12:15PM EST: Steve was a little late but the show has begun.

So far there’s been an hour of WWDC wrapup, the mac mini, and the ipod shuffle (“great for podcasts.”

I could have easily skipped the first hour, especially with my only feed being IRC channels and websites. I am extremely impressed with the form factor on the mac mini and on the price point of the ipod shuffle.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has excellent coverage of iWork ’05. I’d love to see it in action.