With the recent victory of Blu-Ray as the next-gen format, and with Apple belonging to the Blu-Ray disc camp since 2005, it is only natural that we should start to see Blu-Ray in Apple products.

Apple has long been known to bring new standards to the table. Take USB, or the floppy drive for example: When the original iMac was introduced with just USB, hardware manufactures scrambled to make peripherals, even though PC’s had been shipping with USB for years. While the switch was annoying for the early buyers, the iMac is credited for making USB what it is today — and for killing off the floppy.

Others, and myself, speculated for the past 3 years that we would soon see the introduction of Blu-Ray drives into Apple products — particularly as a build-to-order (BTO) option! However, over these past few years the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle rocked us all, and that could be the reason behind the inaction. Was Apple waiting for a clear winner? Is Blu-Ray still too expensive, even for BTO?! After all, Steve Jobs said that 2005 was the year of High-Def! We are almost three months into 2008!

What that reason was, or is, we will find out soon. I get the feeling that this year, we will see Blu-Ray drives in Macs, possibly standard but most likely BTO. Also, conveniently, with the AppleTV and iTunes shift into the living room, we could see another possible collaboration between Apple and Blu-Ray. It is also good to keep in mind that Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder in Disney, which supported the Blu-Ray camp since the beginning. Be it a free digital download with purchase of a Blu-Ray disc, a hardware upgrade to the Apple TV or something else, time can only tell. The future is Blu.

2007 was the year of the iPhone. 2008 might turn out to be the year of multi-touch.

Multi-touch is the core of the iPhone- without it, the iPhone is just a piece of hardware running OS X. With the introduction of the MacBook Air and the multi-touch trackpad, Apple has ushered in a new way of interfacing with our computers and may change the era of computing yet again.

No stranger to the GUI and innovative input devices, Apple has re-defined our ways of interacting with technology. In 1983, Apple pioneered the mouse and the Graphical User Interface (GUI) with the Lisa, and later the Macintosh. A culmination of technology from Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Labs), the way we interacted with computers was changed forever.

Ever since then, we are still interacting with computers in relatively the same way. Trackballs were introduced shortly after the mouse, for specialty or mobile use. In 1994, Apple began to ship trackpads in replacement of trackballs on PowerBook models- the first company to do so. To this day almost every laptop now has a trackpad. Besides these small refinements, there has been no technology truely breaking away from the mouse.

Multi-touch, however isn’t going to replace the mouse either. It is simply enhancing the interaction with the user to make things easier and more intuitive. For example, zooming into a picture would require going to a menu and zooming in, clicking a button or hitting a key command multiple times. On a multi-touch trackpad, that translates to pinching your fingers together in the desired direction. Reading a webpage, and want to go back? Simply swipe your fingers back.

The potential of multi-touch is almost endless, and it is only natural that Apple is now integrating it into their laptops. For those familiar with two finger scrolling found on current Apple laptops- it is hard to go back. Over the coarse of this next year, we will definitely see multi-touch make its way into more of Apple’s products. We should also begin to see other manufactures follow the lead and integrate multi-touch into their products, be it laptops, cameras, cell phones or GPS devices. This has potential to change the way we interact with technology- just try comparing the experience of the iPhone to some Windows Mobile devices!

Technology is continuing to integrate itself into our lives deeper and deeper- and continues to become less and less obtrusive. For example, the Nintendo Wii shattered the gaming industry by creating a remote like controller that can become a baseball bat, crossbow or steering wheel depending on the game. Surprise- the Wii is the currently the best selling ‘next-gen’ console, shipping over 20 million units in one year. Apple changed the cell phone industry forever with the iPhone and has since sold 4 million in almost 7 months.

Multi-touch is here to stay, and so is a new standard for technology. People are fed up with clunky interfaces and complicated devices. Apple has been a large part of this movement, first with the iPod (and iTunes), now with the iPhone and multi-touch. Even Microsoft has developed a multi-touch interface, named “Surface” that will come out later this year. 2008 will most certainly bring large growth of multi-touch devices and with that: a new way of using technology.

Hi, I’m Matt Hamilton, and I have joined theiLife.com as a contributing writer. I am a first-year at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation College of Engineering, and I have been paying much attention for many years to first the Apple Corporation and later the new web start-up boom we currently find ourselves in. Mainly, I’ll focus on how new developments in both the Apple and overall technology sphere affect me and my colleagues here in New York City, but also general advancements and controversies in the technology and web industries. The first topic for me is how Apple and other technology products help out college students. To me, one of the best tests to determine whether a product is actually useful or necessary and fashionable is if college students use it, or really want it. Full article after the jump!
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After the catastrophic realization that Apple would be switching its processor architecture over to x86, Macintosh fans everywhere have to get used to a new approach to product releases. While the PowerPC architecture was limited to a few models, and was updated annually at best, the Intel roadmap looks like something out of a horror movie to the dedicated Mac head. Apple has responded to Intel’s somewhat convoluted release schedule by shying away from timing product launches with hardware changes. The update from Core to Core 2 for example, was non event, the Apple store was updated and that was that. This policy sets a new tone for product releases, and as such, has the added benefit for Apple in making their product releases harder to pinpoint.

It may be hard to say when a product will be updated, but the architecture that will go into the upcoming notebooks is no secret. At CES in January, Intel will show off its brand new 45nm mobile family, codenamed Penryn. This family of processors is the successor to the Merom and Conroe mobile chipsets that were the foundation for the first mobile Core 2 chips. Penryn will have a host of new features, but its role is more evolutionary than revolutionary when compared with the previous jump from the Pentium M/Yonah family of processors to Conroe. The next major revision to the Intel architecture is Nehalem, tentatively scheduled for a late 2008 release.

For now, the Penryn family of processors will see a tremendous improvement in power consumption (a benefit of is 45nm architecture and smaller memory die), cache size (with the high end models having as much as 12mb) and SSE4 processing instructions (which will greatly increase the speed of activities such as video encoding with the proper software optimization). The desktop version of Penyrn, called Wolfsdale will be released shortly after the mobile one, sometime in February. A third variant, Yorksfield is a quad-core variant that may see service in Apple’s Mac Pro line, though so far, that product has been exclusively tied to Intel’s Xeon server chipsets in an attempt to boost power and distinguish it from consumer products.

Performance increase in this series will probably be slight at best and negligible at worst. Unless a program has been optimized for the new SSE4 instructions (DivX is one such program), Penryn has anywhere from a 1% to 10% gain over its Merom/Conroe predecessor at similar clock speeds. For mobile products however, the lower power consumption will result in improved battery times and improved heat management. It is entirely possible that a MacBook Pro update could be announced at Macworld, but with the sheer volume of other possible, and the ambiguous launch date of Penyrn based products, it is far from guaranteed.