Macworld 2007 crystal ball gazing

It’s traditional just before a Macworld conference for all the mac websites to whip themselves into a salivating frenzy, trying to guess what Steve Jobs will announce in his keynote speech, and what will be that “one more thing”…

So why not have a go myself I’m as well informed as any Wall Street analyst (which is to say I have no bleedin’ clue what they’ll do), so here goes:

Since the iSight camera has been withdrawn from sale, a range of new displays with integrated iSights.
They don’t dwell on iPod at Macworld (so no video iPod or iPod Phone - which I think is nothing but baseless rumour anyway), but they will announce the addition of the Beatles back catalogue and a movie studio or two to iTunes (probably not Universal, I’d guess Dreamworks).
Core 2 Duo Mac Mini.
Quad core Mac Pros with blu ray drives.
15.4 inch MacBook with an improved graphics chipset (black) - the current screens are a wee bit small and it’s about time that price premium was about more than just colour and an obscenely overpriced extra 40Gb of hard disk space!
More of the iTV feature-set will be revealed, but it won’t be released. Personally, unless it has PVR functionality I’m not interested in it.
I thought Macworld magazine’s prediction that the release date for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will be announced as March 24^th (the sixth anniversary of OS X’s release) looks pretty convincing. Now that Windows Vista is released, we’ll get to see features that Apple were previously keeping tight-lipped about.
A new version of iLife and other apps that incorporate some funky new features resulting from Apple being all cosy with Google. iPhoto/Picasa, iCal/Google Calendar, iWork/Google Docs integration anyone?

Those are minor things though… They let their 30^th anniversary date slip quietly by but are hyping Macworld. There has to be something big and Mac-related on the cards.

There are a couple of mumblings around that we may see a 30^th anniversary mac, as they unveiled the 20^th anniversary mac back in 1997…

20th Anniversary Mac

… which would be nice, but Apple have since perfected the all-in-one form factor with the iMac (what can they do? make it thinner still?), this wouldn’t be enough of a big deal to get the press and the ol’ share prices excited.

To be honest, I’ve no idea at the moment what the “one more thing” will be, but I think it would have to be an entirely new class of mac.

[UPDATE] The keynote is scheduled to be two hours long, which is much longer than usual. They’ve obviously got plenty to say for themselves.