About 6pm.

Well, as 10.6 was more of a streamlining of the underlying code and throwing away a lot of the legacy support, with little in the way of new features, then I'd expect 10.7 to start building on this new infrastructure again, so I'd expect a big headline feature and lots of little tweaks.

I'm guessing that the iOS look and feel will be integrated more into the OS, perhaps as a separate "layer" - much in the same way that Dashboard or Front Row is. Maybe it will replace both of these? Who knows... nobody but Apple. Will be interesting to see what direction 10.7 will be heading, even though it will probably be about a year before it's released.

Also on my wish list for Wednesday...
• MobileMe becomes free to all (yeah, I can dream!)
• Smaller 7" iPad (already rumoured, but I'd expect that to be January 2011 at the earliest, but SJ does like to surprise us)
• Macbook Air (almost a given, considering it's well over a year since the last updates
• The rumoured touchscreen iMac? (they've already patented a swiveling stand so it can be used as a touchscreen device)
• A streamlined iTunes (less bloat, launches faster like it used to, better Windows version)

Apart from all that. To be honest the family pack is not that much more so does actually make good value anyway.

@ HK
until i had done a clean install of 10.6 from 10.5.8 i never saw anything that would convince me of improvements to the OS

but when i bit the bullet and did a completely clean install of 10.6 i noticed a vast improvement of the OS and a much smaller install size
i also reduced that install size further by running monolingual which removed GiB's of 'stuff' (tech term)

but the system is far more responsive but do check for driver compatibility for older hardware
as my biggest headache was getting drivers that worked on 10.6 for my printer (OSS won the day) ...

iLife expected to be updated for the event.

Shipping has been extended on most sites including the shipping of iMacs and MBPs on the Apple site.

That's another hold-back for me. My HP LaserJet is older than all my Macs, and lives on the network with AppleTalk through a proxy ethernet-enable Mac running OS 9!

Snowy kills AppleTalk, I understand, so the venerable printer would become so much junk. I can't currently afford to replace the printer, but there are workarounds I guess I can use, like getting back the network printer I loaned out, or not bothering to print anything again.

Use a print server?

What model is it?

2100M. I did try to organise a print server/ethernet adaptor for it, but it was a total fail. Currently, I have an ancient PowerBook G3 (one of the really early ones before USB) with AppleTalk, running OS 9 and LocalTalk Bridge, so the printer still appears on the network. It still does that because the AppleTalk drivers still exist in OS X 10.5.

Now, I'm aware there are probably plenty of workarounds to keep this ancient piece of tech still working for me - the printer, not the G3! - but to be honest, it has been on life support for some years. When the current cartridge expires, I suspect we'll scrap the whole machine and move up to something a little more modern. If we can get the readies together.

If we can't, then the Konica Minolta network colour laser will have to do. It's not got PostScript support, but then that's increasingly becoming less important as the world moves on...

Sorry, folks. We're dragging things off topic a bit.

It won‘t be about iPads or anything else. The event is about Macs.

Indeed.

As someone tweeted the other day "Everyone complained that Apple had forgotten about Mac and now there is a Mac event everyone is hoping to hear news about iPads and iPhones!"

Those people can be safely ignored.

+1

Some OS 10.7 rumors to keep us all going

I will be looking forward to it but will not be buying a new machine for a while. I might upgrade the OS and iLife and iWorks suites if they add something new.

I'm tempted to get iLife anyhoo, so we'll see what tonight brings. It'd be nice if iTunes was Cocoa'd fully, but that's not going to happen, but a few other core apps could possibly go that way maybe?