MacWorld Today! My thoughts.

Like an extended Christmas, MacWorld in January is usually the best of the year. New products announced and readily available for purchase. I don't usually go rumor hogging, but there are so many big possibilities that I am pretty damn excited. The big one is the phone, is it here? or is it not? I say its here but it won't be everything to everyone. Either it will be simply under featured or not everyone will be able to use it because of some restrictions. And what is it called? Not iPhone since that's been used by Cisco/LinkSys. Also rumors are saying it will be some sort of iChat mobile phone which I really like.

Another product that was already annoucned is the iTV which is a streaming video box for your iTunes movies. We should see this either released or more fully realized than previously. I personally don't need this since I have a tower with all my iTunes videos and a MacBook Pro which I can stream movies over through FrontRow. But for users without multiple computers this is a really nice device.

It's also rumored that the MacPro Towers will start coming with 8 cores. I'm still running my trusty G5 which I won't be replacing anytime soon... at least I don't think. Another possible introduction is some sort of tablet based Mac. I'm not too keen on this tablet PC format overall, it somehow seems too business like for Mac users - like the PDA has become.

On the software side, we should be seeing a nice preview of Leopard, with iChat, Time Machine and some of those other newer features. Apple will also roll out the yearly iLife and iWork packages. The only rumor arouns is some sort of charting or spreadsheet application that will be part of iWork. I'm not looking for too many features in iLife or iWork, I would like to see iDVD run a bit faster overall, it takes so long to burn a movie. iTunes 7 just came out so it not likely there will be any update here, but maybe some new movie studio will finally come along and sell their wares.

It's 10:18AM, and the show is around 1PM Pacific, so there is time to actually get some work done. Watch MacRumorsLive for minute-by-minute updates. Later.