April will be a busy month for Apple with the unveilling of iPhone OS 4.0 later this week and new MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks tipped for the end of the month.
April looks like being Apple’s busiest month ever. With the US launch of the iPad out of the way, the focus is shifting to the other big guns in Apple’s mobile computing arsenal – the iPhone and the MacBook family of laptops.
(Apple has yet to announce an Australian launch date or pricing for the iPad, with ‘late April’ still the official word and our estimates of
pricing starting at $649 – and perhaps confirmed, according to a possible
leak – still the best guess.)
First up is a media preview of iPhone OS 4.0 which is scheduled for Apple’s Cupertino campus at 10am this coming Thursday, April 8th (which is the wee hours of Friday morning, Sydney time).
Rumours tip the next-gen OS to include multitasking, a unified inbox which contains emails from multiple accounts, and a revised UI.
Apple has been under pressure as competing platforms including Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 have both adopted a more sophisticated and user-friendly UI which incorporates widgets and live feeds rather than the iPhone’s static set of icons to launch individual apps.
The preview of iPhone OS 4.0 should help Apple regain some smartphone cred in the interim period before the OS itself is released alongside the fourth-gen iPhone in June or July.
A full range of revised MacBook laptops are also in the works, according to a Taiwanese trade publication.
The smart money is on a late April launch for new models of the MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air, which will incorporate Intel’s newest Annandale-class mobile processors in the
Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 families.