WWDC Predictions: New Hardware including iPhone Pro

I love this time of year because tech companies announce their products and Apple will undoubtedly be announcing a lot tomorrow at WWDC. I’ll spare us the time and make this quick:

iOS 6 – Obviously and confirmed. I’m guessing Facebook, ton of little features like an updated Mail.app  and the big thing will be Siri APIs.

Mountain Lion – Not much more than what we’ve already seen but with new hardware will come an announcement about how to handle retina apps. The big thing will be retina but we might see Siri APIs I don’t see how it’s possible.

New Macbooks – A lot of sites are predicting that they’ll announce hardware updates across the board here but I don’t think they will. What I see them announcing is a new “Macbook” that has a 15″ retina screen with a wedge design. This is the laptop that I want to buy and will need to be announced for Mountain Lion and OSX developers.

All other laptops will get simple spec bumps. Only until later this year (or maybe next) will we see all the laptops get streamlined where all the laptops will get the wedge (air) design and the Pro models will get dropped.

New Mac Pro – wont be announced, unless it takes 30 seconds of the keynote, but it will get a spec bump tomorrow.

New AppleTV – I think this will steal the show. Rumors of them making an embedded OS for TV manufacturers is awesome and will make everyone chuckle about how GoogleTV was supposed to be the dominant TV.

I believe this would be a smart way of “invading the living room” without doing much. Maybe they’ll sell their own TV hardware but it will be way overpriced compared to a Samsung at Bestbuy and if that Samsung could have Apple TV OS embeded Apple will still be able to sell media and apps.

I don’t think Siri is the big feature for a new Apple TV OS, instead it’s an app store and Siri APIs.

iPhone Pro – The new phone has to be announced tomorrow because developers need to plan for the  the bigger screens. I don’t know if they’ll be ready for order but if they are I believe we will see some kind of restriction to prevent everyone from ordering it. I don’t know what that restriction will be but it could involve developers only for the first 6/90 days or maybe it will be sold without a carrier subsidy and be super expensive.

The other idea: this new bigger iPhone will be iPhone Pro. 

I like the iPhone Pro idea because they could release this new phone at a premium (subsidy or not) and still sell the excellent iPhone 4s.

…wow, this was supposed to be short. Anyway, I’ll probably follow along on twitter throughout the morning and listen to 5by5 in the afternoon since I have a ton of work to do this week.