What is Apple's grand plan?

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We're a quarter way through the year, and Apple still seems to be doing extremely well.

New Macs are obviously imminent - that's plain. When you put a great new technology into new MacBook Pros (Thunderbolt), and other vendors start building cool things to use the new connector, it's pretty clear all the other Macs need to get with it too, along with the Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs that are demonstrably superior. Imagine an iMac with Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt? Imagine a MacBook ... Even the Mac mini.

And let's not forget the Mac Pro tower.

Actually, the Mac Pro needs something a lot better than a four-core Sandy Bridge; why get a huge tower if it's no faster than a MacBook Pro?

But I bet Apple has that covered, too. Last week Intel unveiled a possible contender - Sandy Bridge-based high-performance Xeon E7 CPUs on Westmere-EX architecture. The CPUs are intended for both servers and "very high performance computers". These new CPUs 10 (!) real cores and can handle as many as 20 simultaneous code threads at once with Hyperthreading.

The chips are based on a 32-nanometer manufacturing process and are as much as 40 percent faster than current Xeon 7500. The EX chips are also more power efficient - they entirely shut down parts of the chip not being used to save energy while the processor only has light load.

Imagine a 10-core chipped Mac Pro with a couple of Thunderbolt channels. You can imagine workers' Macs having 'accidents' so they have to get these new ones, can't you? As apparently, one in four office workers reckon the best way to get a new work computer is to damage the ones they have.

Forty per cent of office workers have complained of ageing workplace PCs, saying they damage their productivity. Many appear tempted to resort to extreme measures to get upgrades. Some ten per cent of UK workers said they'd even resort to buying new parts for their work devices themselves to perform their own upgrades. Now that's something NZ's National government would support!

That's what the site 'thinq' reckons, anyway.

Meanwhile, other manufacturers are releasing Thunderbolt products. A couple of hard drive manufacturers were quick off the mark, but now Sonnet, a one-time provider of Mac accelerators, then other peripherals, just announced that a line of its professional Fusion storage products now have Thunderbolt technology. The new releases include a portable two-drive SSD system, an economical four-drive RAID 5 unit and a professional eight-drive RAID storage system for video pros. Sonnet's Echo Express PCIe 2.0 Expansion Chassis with Thunderbolt ports enables users to plug in high-performance PCIe 2.0 adapters such as video capture cards, Fibre Channel cards, Sonnet RAID controllers and more, to any computer with a Thunderbolt port.

All of these products include two Thunderbolt ports for daisy chaining - you can connect up to six devices to a single Thunderbolt port on the host computer.

The Sonnet products will become available in New Zealand via the third-party Apple specialist vendor MacSense.

Meanwhile, the MacBook Air is still enjoying runaway success. I certainly didn't expect this - to my mind it's exquisitely slim, but overpriced and underpowered compared to 'real' Mac laptops. If it wasn't for SSD storage giving them rather amazing performance, I would be tempted to write the Air off as the glam version of the iPad.

Clearly, this is wrong. Since its October 2010 refresh, popularity of the MacBook Air has been rapidly increasing, according to research by JP Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz. Sales of the device saw a 333% year-over-year rise, with a projected annual revenue of a whopping $2.2 billion.

This is partly due to price: when it first appeared in January of 2008, a 13-inch machine was the only option and had a crazy starting price of nearly NZ$3000 (US$1799). And it really was underpowered, but boy, was it slim - it's the only computer I've ever had that women stopped and stared at in a café. One even sat down at my table to have a go with it; I was pretty surprised.

But the new one is slimmer still and, thanks mostly to the Solid State Drive, a dramatically better performer. Now there are two machines to choose from, both of which come equipped with SSD hard drives as standard, and the smaller 11.6-inch bemonitored version can be had for just $1699 ($999 in the US).

SSD will be the next revolution - it can't be that far away until every Mac has SSD as standard, along with Thunderbolt. This will allow every current Mac design to be slimmer. Soon the only thing holding back sizes will be how big screens need to be.

But is that all that new Macs promise? Apple has been building a massive data centre in the US (at Maiden, North Carolina) for some time now, causing lots of speculation. And a new rumour says that's not the only place Apple is building super-data centres.

Apple recently ordered 12 million Gigabytes of storage ... for what? TV. That's the strongest rumour, anyway. For a while, people speculated that it was just for an improved MobileMe service, but what Apple's been working at seems far in excess of that.

More and more analysts have been imagining (as that's the only operable word) an Apple-branded television with a big, beautiful display, built-in Apple TV and DVR capabilities, live programming and television channels via iTunes, 1080p iOS gaming via the App Store and running AirPlay from every Apple (and licensed) device in the house.

(I'd like to add a feature - decent sound quality and volume, please.)

Piper Jaffray's resident Apple analyst Gene Munster, and Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty have been sticking to their predictions of a 'new video gadget' from Apple in 2012 or 2013, plus a companion cloud service stemming from an alleged array of super datacentres.

Apple has also been hiring gaming talent - a serious Apple move into games has been long lamented.

But hey, it's all speculation. That Apple has big plans is clear. It's working on something, and spending a fortune at it. What those plans are: far from clear. And I'm pretty sure Apple is not building a datacentre in New Zealand - even if it bothers to do so in Australia, where 'Apple NZ' is based, we're constrained by that one damn cable under the Tasman again, putting the efficacy of any cloud-based services in doubt.

Sucks to be us.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com