Once again January approaches and for those of us living in the World of Apple that means the biggest event of the year is just around the corner. Macworld Expo 2009 will run from January 5th to the 9th and as always will take place in San Francisco.

This years Macworld lacks the hype of previous years and also lacks the handfuls of rumours that the previous lead ups to Macworld have delivered. Take for example the approach to Macworld 2007, the air was filled with talk of the iPhone and it certainly delivered.

This years Macworld is already a completely different story to previous years; only a couple of weeks ago Apple announced that Steve Jobs would not host the famed keynote presentation and instead Phil Schiller would do the honours. The company also revealed that this would be the final Macworld that they exhibit at.

This article isn’t to discuss Apple’s reasons for making such decisions nor to speculate on the health of Steve Jobs. Let’s take a look at the few rumours that have surfaced in the past few months.

Macworld 2009 Keynote Predictions

  • Snow Leopard preview by Bertrand Serlet.
  • Updated iMac with NVIDIA chipsets
  • Updated Mac mini with NVIDIA chipsets
  • iLife and iWork ‘09

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard first saw an appearance at WWDC earlier this year at that time Apple said it would ship “in about a year”. Since then we’ve been presented with evidence that Snow Leopard could ship by the end of the first calendar quarter of 2009. But recent builds given to developers would suggest that Snow Leopard is far from being a shipping product.

It is incredibly unlikely that Apple will announce a firm shipping date at Macworld as past experience would show that the publicity isn’t grand when Apple misses a deadline, so why set one at all?

One thing we can expect at Macworld is for Phil Schiller or possibly Bertrand Serlet to give a detailed talk about what Snow Leopard will deliver.

We’ve already been told by Apple that Snow Leopard is not going to be an operating system that delivers bucket loads of new features, instead Snow Leopard is positioned to enhance the performance and security of Mac OS X Leopard.

Key to Snow Leopard are two technologies, the first called Grand Central aims to deliver support for multi-core processors but instead of developers having to rewrite applications to be “multi-core aware” the operating system itself will have the ability to assign tasks across multiple cores and processors. In addition to Grand Central, Open CL (Open Computing Language) allows developers to tap into the power of the generally idle GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). GPU’s are incredibly powerful and all Macs are rumoured to have the latest offerings from NVIDIA by the time Snow Leopard sees a public release.

As the release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard approaches I’m personally seeing a familiar bunch of comments being bounded about. There familiarity comes from before Mac OS X Leopard hit store shelves and they insinuated that Apple would keep new, big features under its hat until the very last minute. At the time I attempted to stress to these individuals that new feature cannot go untested by the very large developer base and therefore no feature can stay secret.

If Apple does intend to pack Snow Leopard out with new features we’ll certainly hear about them.

Updated iMac

The evidence is indisputable, text strings found in current versions Mac OS X point towards a currently unreleased model of iMac which the reasonably reliable DigiTimes believes Apple has ordered 800,000 units for the first quarter of 2009.

Of interest the aforementioned text strings point towards Apple adopting NVIDIA chipsets for the new iMacs, the company did the same for the new notebooks release back in October.

Apple has already made the iMac a reasonably “green” product when it introduced the new models with aluminium enclosures and glossy glass displays, it would be unexpected for Apple to redesign the iMac.

Mac mini

The poor Mac mini has suffered a game of on and off rumours for over a year now, but finally it seems some concrete evidence points towards an update being just around the corner.

The same text strings that revealed the iMac to be due for an update also point towards an unreleased Mac mini product code.

As with the iMac the text strings indicate that the new Mac mini will also come with NVIDIA chipsets and presumably far more powerful graphics capabilities than the current incarnation.

iWork/iLife ‘09

Going back in the timeline of iWork and iLife it wasn’t hard to predict a pattern this was until Macworld 2007. Until that point Apple had released a major update at every single Macworld since 2003. In 2007 Apple decided to release iLife and iWork ‘08 at a special event in August, the same did not hold true for 2008.

Despite having zero rumours regarding the two software suites it wouldn’t be too far fetched to imagine Apple releasing major updates to iLife and iWork at Macworld 2009.

17-inch MacBook Pro

In October 2008 Apple released a brand new redesigned MacBook Pro but only the 15-inch model received the revamp treatment.

Just after the release of the 15-inch model it was rumoured that the 17-inch model would follow “in a few months”. Apple will likely quietly release the 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Macworld 2009 Coverage

As with past years World of Apple will be at Macworld offering extensive coverage of the expo and keynote. Despite having no live coverage of the Keynote we will offer large galleries of photos from the keynote and from the expo floor.