People normally do not upgrade their Mac or MacBook every year, unless you are the fortunate one who can afford so. A three year-old Mac is still very much usable for common day-to-day tasks due to an efficient Mac OS X, upgrade is inevitable eventually.

Some people hold on to their Mac purchase, mostly convinced by Apple rumor mill that a new Mac release is imminent. For us, anytime is a good time to buy a Mac since you can not always catch up with technologies. But it is always wise to look after your pocket by looking a bit farther on the horizon and plan the schedule for your purchase.

We look at few technologies that are likely to make it into Macs and MacBook by end of this year or in 2010.

USB 3

At 10 times the bandwidth of the current ubiquitous USB2.0, the third iteration is poised to appear in consumer products in 2010. With a speed of roughly 5Gbps, USB 3 may well spell the death nail for Firewire as one of standard ports in Macs.

SATA 3

SATA3 spec is officially completed and released 2 days ago by the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO). The new spec boost the transfer speed to 6 Gbps and is backward compatible with existing SATA devices.

SATA 3 is a natural upgrade to be the next standard in hard disk interface. SATA3 hard disk is expected to be widely available by end of this year. Apple might lead the industry to be the first to adopt this as standard in Macs.

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Two iPhone technologies, CoreLocation and Multi-Touch, are coming to the Mac. These software frameworks are included in the latest developer seed of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, allows developers to add CoreLocation (ability to identify the current latitude and longtitude of your Mac) and multi-touch features to Mac applications.

In the iPhone, CoreLocation makes use of the hardware’s GPS or WiFi to identify its location. Current Macs will make use of less accurate WiFi method for obtaining the location since there is no GPS technology included. We suspect that future Macs especially MacBooks will have built-in GPS technology as standard.

Current Macs already have multi-touch support via the multi-touch trackpad in newer MacBooks. By including the multi-touch APIs framework, Apple is making it easier for developer to multi-touch enabled their application. We are guessing Apple will extend the support for multi-touch to include touch-panel LCD in future Macs.