Another year, another keynote
January 1st, 2008 by Ryan GovostesWell, it’s finally January 1st, a day that I celebrate by writing the date wrong, a sacred tradition that lasts through mid-July. Today also means that my birthday is just around the corner, and friend of the family Steve Jobs is out picking a present for me.
Two years ago, he announced the first Intel-based MacBook Pro and iMac; for my eighteenth birthday, he unveiled the Apple TV and a lesser-known handheld device called the iPhone. So what does Uncle Steve have in store for me this year?
The rumor sites are forecasting the usual design refreshes and new products and services (Apple phone, touchscreen iPod, Newton rebirth, ultra-portable laptop, …). I’m not in-the-know, so I can’t make any authoritative comments on these things, but I certainly won’t pass up the fun of generating new baseless rumors in authoritative tone:
Apple will be releasing an update to QuickTime Player which will deliver numerous new features. To start, Apple will remove the license fee for Pro (on Mac, at least). This comes after we saw fullscreen mode lose its Pro status in July, while other Pro-only features have shown up iLife and other free programs (see Siracusa’s rant circa 2005). The MPEG-2 Playback component will also become free, and will be included as part of the main QuickTime package.
Moving on to more important matters, Jobs will announce support for a new codec: VC-1, a standard of both Blu-ray, which Apple has backed since 2005, as well as rival HD-DVD; if Macs are to be equipped with either flavor come the 15th, VC-1 is a necessity. To this end, Apple may announce the acquisition of Telestream, which authors the Flip4Mac WMV playback suite. Historically, Apple revealed its Pixlet codec at WWDC 2003, and showed off H.264 support at NAB 2004.
While it may not be announced at MacWorld, developers will be happy to see the QuickTime APIs become fully 64-bit compatible, with a large number of functions becoming deprecated in favor of more modern Core Video equivalents. This will serve as a segue into more enhancements as LLVM (another Siracusa hat tip) allows playback to be more finely tuned to the OS and hardware. It remains to be seen how Windows will be treated; 64-bit users have long suffered without compatible versions of QuickTime and iTunes, but the API changes will push the Mac and Windows branches further apart in terms of functionality.
The changes to QuickTime will be part of the keynote’s overall digital media theme, although it will inevitably be a minor player as movie rentals, iTunes’ expanded DRM-free offerings, and others take center stage.
2003 was “the year of the notebook,” 2005 was “the year of high definition video,” 2007 was “one of the most exciting new product years in Apple’s history.” Based on this trend, I can safely conclude that 2008 won’t be the year of anything, but 2009 should be a real blast.
I’ll see you in the near future when I reveal disturbing facts about cell phone text messaging. Be sure to tune your feed reader to my frequency to get up-to-the-minute updates.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:39 am
The old QuickTime APIs will never be 64-bit compatible. Apple’s been replacing them with QTKit, which is a set of Objective-C APIs to manipulate movies and such.
“64-bit users have long suffered without compatible versions of QuickTime and iTunes”
You’re kidding, right? Without a complete rewrite, they couldn’t have a 64-bit iTunes anyways as Carbon isn’t 64-bit.
January 1st, 2008 at 11:22 am
That’s an interesting projection; Apple aquires Telestream. Seems an unlikely event, based on the wmv licensing arrangement T-Stream has with Microsoft. Good rumor, though….cause F4M has sure made it’s mark in the Mac universe.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:02 pm
Apple and Google are either debt-free or almost entirely free of debt that any liabilities on their pristine balance sheets are negligable. Google needs its cash to build data centres, buy real estate, hire employees and do large acquisitions so it has somewhat of an excuse for not paying a shareholder dividend.
Apple, on the other hand, rarely makes an acquisition. When they do, it’s for small companies such as your Telestream rumour that complement existing products. That said, they have an abundance of cash on their balance sheet and it’s doing nothing. Since stock buybacks are rarely big enough to amount to any sizable increase in earnings per share and are almost entirely a cosmetic move (even more so than stock splits) that benefit insiders by allowing insiders to sell their shares back to the company for cancellation at full market value outside of any pre-arranged trading plan, a dividend seems like a great move. It would also insulate Apple’s bubble-like share price somewhat from serious declines because at least they’d be paying a dividend.
Intel and Microsoft are two tech companies that pay dividends, albeit small ones with between 1 and 1.5% annual yields. You are big enough and capable enough of following their lead, Apple. Pay a quarterly dividend.
Cheers,
Doug
Disclosure: I own none of the companies mentioned. My portfolio is comprised almost entirely in cash, with small positions in TransForce Income Fund (a trucking and logistics company) and Yellow Pages Income Fund (the dominant publisher of print and online telephone directories across Canada in every province except Saskatchewan).
January 15th, 2008 at 6:48 pm
[…] the first, I posted some unfounded rumors about QuickTime updates during MacWorld. As promised, now that the keynote is over I’ll […]