My technical summer

I finally had a vacation a couple of weeks ago - we spent 10 days on the Vineyard. Delightful, and I miss the crap out of the place the second I drive onto the ferry to leave and look out at the harbor behind me as the boat pulls away from the dock. Business has been respectable, though not fantastic. New clients are coming on board pretty regularly and there are some opportunities that seem to be available that may be able to get us back in growth mode. Which would be nice.

Some of those are due to the upcoming Summer of Technology that I can look forward to. All I can say right now about iOS 5 is that I'm running the first beta on my iPad 2, and I'm expecting Beta 2 this week. Pesky NDAs. It is not yet at the point where I will trust my iPhone to it - I depend far too much on my iPhone whereas the iPad is a luxury.

But when iOS 5 arrives in the next few months it'll be awesome.

The next iPhone itself will be due in late August/early September. Maybe in conjunction with the 2011 iPods, but more likely a separate announcement. I'm expecting the iPhone 5 to be more of an "iPhone 4S", similar to how the iPhone 3GS kept the form factor of the 3 but beefed up the underlying specs. Well, I'm figuring on a dual-core A5 chip, possibly more RAM (768MB or 1GB, up from 512MB), a better imaging chip, a little better battery life, and not much else. It'll probably be a single phone for both GSM and CDMA networks, and will likely support VoRA on CDMA.

Next year will be the super-duper iPhone LTE. When both major US carriers are ready to support it and the chipsets are more mature.

Then, sometime between tomorrow and a month from now we can expect Apple to release new Mac minis (with i5 processors and Thunderbolt), new MacBook Airs (with i5 low-voltage processors and Thunderbolt), and new Mac Pros (with newer Xeons, Thunderbolt, and a redesigned chassis that should support rackmounting).

The only question to me is whether they ship pre-Lion or post-Lion. I'm hoping for pre-Lion as that way I'll have a higher adoption rate early. A lot of my clients aren't ready for Lion and are holding off on some new purchases waiting for upgraded models - they'll buy sooner if the new systems ship with Snow Leopard.

Windows has almost become an afterthought to the business - we support it but don't really actively seek new clients on the platform, and I can't remember the last Exchange server I installed from scratch (I've upgraded a couple). Windows 7 doesn't suck, but it's not enough to keep people who want to switch to Apple from making the leap.

And a lot of them do.

So I think I've pretty much got my time all booked out through September now, just on Apple's new kit. I haven't even had time to buy any more Bluetooth headsets. Still relying mainly on my Jawbone Era.