Through an unnamed source*, I have put together a list of sure-fire predictions for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2011 keynote and its knock-on effects for Apple and the tech industry.

• Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) will be demoed further. Apple pundits will bitch and complain about how the new features are rubbish, pointless, stupid and smell a bit of wee. These same pundits will then be writing up features and tutorials about how UNICORN AMAZING said features are, approximately fourteen seconds after they’ve had a chance to play with them themselves.
• iOS 5 will be revealed, with a number of features that improve Apple’s mobile platform immeasurably. However, because Apple won’t include features that tech pundits want, iOS 5 will be widely slammed, despite appealing more to consumers. Also, iOS 5 will in some way include features that bear a little resemblance to things Android can already do. This will cause an Android-user smugness overload on the internet, countered by an Apple fan-boy whinealanche that will cause almost half of the internet to CATCH FIRE.
• Analysts will react to the keynote by claiming their predictions, which were almost the exact opposite of what was revealed, were in fact the same as what was revealed, and will happily continue making up bullshit and getting paid for it. Forever.
• Apple is doomed will be a common theme, due to the company missing out the one thing a prominent tech pundit wanted to see in Lion or iOS 5, and also for not releasing devices that the competition are making but that themselves will in the long run be doomed to failure. Apple, naturally, will only remain doomed in the press, while making more money every second than you could stuff down your pants, even if you have really big, baggy pants.
• Apple will take down its entire store, just to fuck with people’s heads. With any luck, it will come back up, with only a single price-change to one product: the price of the Digital AV Adapter, down by a single Euro, and only in the Belgian store.
• Most people will be disappointed with whatever Apple announces, because most people believe the hype and don’t appreciate how stunning the technology we have is, and even how fantastic the incremental updates we’re getting are. As this YouTube video says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. START BEING HAPPY. NOW.

Reckon I’ll be six-for-six this year.

* My brain, which doesn’t have a name, and is therefore thoroughly jealous of my kneecaps, Arthur and Gerald.

Regular readers of Revert to Saved may remember that I’m Contributing Editor to Future Publishing’s rather fab Tap! magazine. The title is dedicated to iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch, and I’m responsible for its games section. For issue 5, editor Christopher Phin tasked me with writing a cover feature about iOS gaming, covering the best available games, what games designers think about the platform, exploring kit, and offering the odd nod to retro-gaming. Designer Chris Hedley then created one of the best covers I’ve seen on a consumer tech mag, featuring a ton of iOS gaming characters.

The magazine of course also includes all the usual iOS news, reviews, tutorials, features and columns. If you’re a UK subscriber, you should get your copy within the next couple of days (if it’s not already arrived). Alternatively, the magazine should be on newsstands (WHSmith, Tesco and other stores) some time during the next week.

Charlie Brooker, in his latest piece for The Guardian:

Look at the App Store. Read the reviews of novelty games costing 59p. Lots of slaggings – which is fair enough when you’re actively warning other users not to bother shelling out for something substandard. But they often don’t stop there. In some cases, people insist the developers should be jailed for fraud, just because there weren’t enough levels for their liking. I once read an absolutely scathing one-star review in which the author bitterly complained that a game had only kept them entertained for four hours.

FOUR HOURS? FOR 59P? AND YOU’RE ANGRY ENOUGH TO WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT? ON YOUR EXPENSIVE IPHONE? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?

He says this is human nature, with technology having left us hopelessly spoiled. I say people should get a sense of perspective, because their incessant moaning about App Store games is ridiculous. I wonder how many of these idiots whining about a good 59p game that provides four hours of entertainment have ever bought a game on another platform (such as the Nintendo DS, with its carts costing 15 quid a pop or more), or back in the days where you took a punt on an Amiga game for 25 quid. Even in the mid-1980s, the era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum, the absolute cheapest games were £1.99, came on cassette, and were—proportionately speaking—often as bad as the worst 59p iPhone ‘specials’, with the odd gem randomly lurking in the mix.

Four hours of fun gameplay for 59p isn’t something to complain about—it’s something that should be celebrated.

Peter Burrows, reporting for BusinessWeek, on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop addressing 2000 employees:

For a moment, Elop, 47, lays into the complacency he sees settling over the company. When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. “That upsets me—not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against.”

He’s absolutely right. And this is something of a contrast to Ballmer’s iPhone snatch/pretend stomp a while back, reported by the Wall Street Journal. Mind you, it’s also a change of heart for Elop himself. From the WSJ article:

Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s business division, used Apple products before Mr. Ballmer lured him to Microsoft in early 2008. But at a meeting of Microsoft sales representatives after joining, Mr. Elop placed his personal iPhone into an industrial-strength blender and destroyed it

Yup. That’s a great way of figuring out how to beat the competition: see if its products will blend. At least Elop’s grown up a bit—the question now is whether Ballmer will too.

Apple’s announced that it will reveal iCloud at WWDC, and the rumour mill is swirling with what features the service will bring. Foremost among them is the claim Apple has signed up the four major record labels for a cloud music service. Other claims are that Apple will offer similar back-up/streaming services for movies, television shows and documents.

I’d be excited about this, if it wasn’t for two things. First, I don’t buy a lot of iTunes content, and I’ve a horrible feeling Steve Jobs is going to bang on about some ‘magical’ system that backs up your iTunes purchases to the cloud. I can’t imagine there’s any chance we’ll see all your music, regardless of source, available. In part, this is because Apple itself won’t have copies of all tracks anyway, but also labels are greedy and will almost certainly block any attempt to enable access to tracks that might have been downloaded on the sly, even if they would make money from streaming subscriptions. Another possibility would be for Apple to offer a small ‘upgrade’ fee per track, like it did for iTunes Plus, but that also seems a stretch. In any case, Spotify will probably remain a better bet for Brits.

The second concern I have stems from my experience with the Apple TV. Using my UK iTunes account, it’s still the same content-light box it was when I got the device at Christmas, and that’s never changed for Brits since the dawn of the revamped black box. By contrast, Americans get Netflix, TV rentals, baseball and more. It’s understandable that Apple concentrates first on the US, which is a large, affluent market, but it’s disappointing there are no Apple TV deals in the UK to integrate iPlayer, 4OD and LoveFilm at the very least—and UK TV rentals might never happen. With iCloud, you can bet Jobs will reveal a bunch of great features, only for anyone outside of the USA to chance across a subtly different web page on their country’s Apple site, missing features but, crucially, not missing any of an associated price-tag. (You can also bet that the US tech media will fail to report on this, too, as always.)

The one saving grace here will be if Apple finally manages to provide some kind of usable, useful back-up and restoration process for iOS devices. If my iPod, iPhone and iPad could save app data and preferences to the cloud and reinstate them on an app reinstall, and perhaps even optionally sync data (such as progress in videogames), I’ll be prepared to overlook Apple overlooking my country.