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Flailing Wildly
Too much straw, not enough camel.

Apple’s October 2014 Product Announcement

by Ryan Parman • October 9, 2014 • Apple • No comments

Apple’s October 16th product announcement begins at 10am PST; 1pm EST.

My guesses?

  • Definitely: OS X Yosemite, iTunes 12, and the next-gen iPad Air and iPad mini.

  • Maybe: Updated Thunderbolt 2 + Retina display (I’d guessed at this last year and was wrong), iMac with Retina display, updates to the MacBook Pro line, Apple TV 4 with support for third-party apps.

  • Not a chance: An HDTV, more info about Apple Watch, a mega-sized iPad, or a pull-string-to-talk Steve Jobs doll.

New iPads

Thinner, faster, beefier. I would expect to see a marginally-improved camera, and Touch ID is a definite.

iPad Air and iPad mini should have equal specs, except for the screen sizes. I don’t believe that a 12-point-whatever-inch “iPad Air Plus” will be a thing.

Retina Thunderbolt 2 Display

I’ve been looking forward to the successor to the Thunderbolt display for quite a while now, and I really hope that this is it. Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3.0 have been shipping in modern Macs for a couple of years now, and I’m anxious to see an updated display.

Also, Helvetica looks like ass in Yosemite on non-Retina displays. It seems like a good time to update.

Apple TV 4

I’ve also been keenly interested in seeing support for third-party apps on Apple TV.

With modern SDK features like better scalability for different viewports, games for iPad (4:3) and iPhone (16:9), the introduction of a controller API in iOS 7, the Metal API, and a well-built system for managing your account, apps and games, introducing a new Apple TV capable of gaming and third-party apps seems ripe.

Maybe not PS4 or Xbox One-caliber just yet, but Apple TV has been outselling both of them (by an order of magnitude) for a couple of years now. Nintendo should be very, very worried.

Ryan Parman

Ryan Parman is an entrepreneur, open source evangelist and passionate usability advocate currently living in Seattle. He is the founder and visionary behind SimplePie and CloudFusion, co-founder of WarpShare, member of the RSS Advisory Board, and creator of the AWS SDK for PHP. Ryan's aptly-named blog, Flailing Wildly, is where he writes about ideas longer than 140 characters.

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