Apple is the one who brought the Light Peak concept to Intel, with Intel developing and producing the technology. It is safe bet that Apple will be among the first to use it on Mac. Light Peak has the potential of becoming universal only when Intel put the technology into its chipset. That’s how USB 2 gained widespread usage when Intel put it into its chipset in 2002.

As for USB 3, Intel is half-hearted in its support as there is no support for USB 3 in Intel chipset yet. Intel is still committed to USB 3 but there are speculation that we will see USB 3 in Intel chipset as far out as 2012. USB 3 is available only in selected models of computers from HP, Dell and Asus. The adoption so far has not been rapid and widespread.

It is evident that Apple and Intel see Light Peak as a replacement for USB 2. We should see Mac sporting Light Peak port as standard from 2011 onwards. Mac will still comes with USB 2 ports during the transition to Light Peak technology, and  we do not expect USB 3 to appear on a Mac.

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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.

Blu-ray

It is still anyone’s guess if we will see Blu-ray support in Mac. It might never happen. Many believe Blu-ray will be the last disc format for content delivery. Apple is obviously advocating the online model for media delivery, but might support Blu-ray when it becomes the choice of the common people compared with DVD.

We do not see Blu-ray writable disc has any mileage to compete as storage media in a world of cheap hard disks and NAS.

OLED Screen

OLED screen is rumored coming for the next Apple MacBook. A brighter better colored screen is always welcomed, but mostly we look forward to better ‘fuel’ efficiency with the latest screen technology.

Build-in WWAN

We expect build-in WWAN with support of 3G/GPRS/HSDPA cellular standards in some future MacBook models. It might even become standard feature for all Apple notebooks.

GPS

We will not be surprised if Apple build GPS hardware into one of the future MacBook model. Increasingly people are finding benefits in using location-based services, why limit the usage to mobile device only?

HD Video iSight

This is more of a wish list. We hope Apple will upgrade the build-in iSight to support 720p HD video recording.

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