What we’ll see in this year’s iPhone, why we won’t seen an iPhone on Ver­i­zon until next year, and when to expect all the new Apple hotness.

We’ve got three weeks to go until Apple’s 2010 World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence (WWDC). Start­ing June 7, we expect Apple to shift into a higher gear and… Well, that’s just the thing. There’s a lot of con­fu­sion out there about, what, exactly, we’re going to see. I don’t have a crys­tal ball. I don’t have seekrit sources deep inside Apple (seeds, if you will). But I do have the Chew­bacca Defense:

More impor­tantly, I have the inverse of the Chew­bacca Defense, Occam’s Razor. In short, given a num­ber of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions, the sim­plest is prob­a­bly true. And Apple isn’t as secre­tive as they think. They can’t hide their own past. We can divine a lot from what they’ve already done, extrap­o­late future behav­ior based on pre­vi­ous trends. So here’s what I’m sure we’re going to see, and when. Steve and com­pany might sur­prise me, but I doubt it.

First, the main event. In his open­ing keynote on June 7th, Steve is going to announce the next iPhone, the iPhone HD. It will fea­ture a 2VGA, 640×960 screen, come in 16, 32 and 64GB capac­i­ties, sport the same A4 CPU as the iPad, run iPhone OS 4, have 256MB of RAM and look iden­ti­cal to the pro­duc­tion test model Giz­modo “acquired.” It will most likely be avail­able two weeks later, on June 21 or 22.

How do I know this? Because it’s sim­ply the over­whelm­ingly most likely sce­nario. Look at the facts.

  • Apple has announced and released their new flag­ship iPhone in June every year, at WWDC.
  • They’ve stuck to an annual update/​release sched­ule for their other prod­ucts, par­tic­u­larly in the iPhone, iPod (and pre­sum­ably iPad) family.
  • The Giz­modo test unit is obvi­ously real, and John Gru­ber pointed out than the mark­ings on the back iden­ti­fied it as a late-​stage pro­duc­tion test, unlikely to change much, if at all, before full production.
  • The iPad comes in 16, 32 and 64MB capac­i­ties, and the Viet­namese tear­down of a test model nearly iden­ti­cal to the Giz­modo unit revealed an A4 and 256MB of RAM.
  • The iPad has 256MB of RAM, and was almost cer­tainly designed with OS4 in mind.

I sus­pect it will be called the iPhone HD because of the 4x res­o­lu­tion screen. We’ve seen mul­ti­ple sources reveal­ing the pixel dou­bled 640×960 res­o­lu­tion, the Giz­modo unit was obvi­ously of a much higher res­o­lu­tion than cur­rent iPhones. No, the screen isn’t 720 pix­els tall in land­scape, but I’m will­ing to bet it will be capa­ble of 720p HD video out. The screen will be extended view­ing angle LCD, the same as the iPad, as this is more likely than Apple switch­ing dis­play tech­nol­ogy to AMOLED.

Why will the iPhone HD have only 256MB of RAM? Because Apple clearly believes this is suf­fi­cient for the man­aged, lim­ited mul­ti­task­ing in OS4, or they would have put 512MB in the iPad. And in prac­tice, I have every con­fi­dence 256MB will be “enough for any­one.” Why? Because that’s what’s in the 3GS, and Backgrounder/​Proswitcher work pretty well on the 3GS. And Back­grounder uses “real,” Android/​WinMob-​style mul­ti­task­ing. Apple’s Pal­mOS Cobalt-​style mul­ti­task­ing is far more resource-​friendly, and I expect it to mul­ti­task as smoothly on 256MB as Android does on 512MB. And all things being equal, less RAM is cheaper to pro­duce, mean­ing more profit per phone. Apple likes profit.

I’ve heard rumors that the iPhone HD will be avail­able June 7, but I don’t buy it. Apple wouldn’t rush a deliv­ery date, no mat­ter what kind of press dif­fi­cul­ties they’ve had, and OS4, at the time of this writ­ing, sim­ply isn’t ready to burn onto pro­duc­tion devices and have them in stores in three weeks. It’s far more likely that they’ll announce on the 7th and release two weeks later, as they’ve done with other devices. I’m bet­ting the iPhone HD will go on sale on the 22nd, as Apple seems to like Tues­day launches. OS4 itself might be avail­able for pre­vi­ous iPhones on the 7th, if it’s ready.

I don’t think Steve’s keynote will be all about hard­ware, though. In con­junc­tion with the release of OS4, I expect Apple to release iTunes 10, with some impor­tant new fea­tures. The biggest new fea­ture will be the incor­po­ra­tion of LaLa’s tech­nol­ogy into iTunes Live, the abil­ity to stream your entire iTunes col­lec­tion to your iPhone from Apple’s shiny new dat­a­cen­ter in North Car­olina. And because they’ve got all that server capac­ity lying around, they’ll also throw in the basics of MobileMe – email, con­tacts and cal­en­dar sync, maybe iDrive for peo­ple who aren’t already using Drop­box – for free.

Why do I expect this? Again, it fits the pro­file of past behav­ior. Apple knows they need to step up their cloud efforts if they’re going to com­pete effec­tively with Google, and yes, Microsoft. A lit­tle over a year ago, I wrote about com­put­ing ecosys­tems, and that is crys­tal­liz­ing more than ever. Apple wants to keep its users locked into its ecosys­tem, and that means they need to pro­vide the same ser­vices as their com­pe­ti­tion. Google and Microsoft both offer email, cal­en­dar­ing and con­tacts man­age­ment for free. Apple can’t afford to keep charg­ing for the same. They’ve made these kinds of com­pet­i­tive moves before. The most recent was the intro­duc­tion of the iBook­store, a direct response to Amazon’s Kin­dle busi­ness. Jobs and com­pany aren’t stu­pid. They know they need to deliver. That said, I expect them to hold off some of the fea­tures cur­rently in MobileMe – Back To My Mac, Find My iPhone, etc. – for pay­ing sub­scribers. After all, this is Apple.

This fall, as usual, Apple will update their iPod line. Rolled into this will be the OS4 update for the iPad. Why? Because they’re also going to be updat­ing the iPod touch to OS4, and the iPad is more sim­i­lar to the iPod touch than it is to the iPhone. Makes sense that these would be related devel­op­ment tracks. Rumors sur­faced that the iPad might be due for a price drop sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal iPhone. I don’t buy this. I could see it if the iPad were a slow starter, a way to prime the mar­ket. But right now Apple is still hav­ing trou­ble mak­ing enough of them to meet demand. There’s absolutely no rea­son to drop the price. Ship­ping it with OS4 this fall will be all the extra shiny they need for an update.

Okay, you say, but what about the ele­phant in the room? The big red ele­phant, with the V on it? As we’ve recently dis­cov­ered, Apple’s exclu­siv­ity agree­ment with AT&T was ini­tially for an unheard of five years. That doesn’t end until 2012. Don’t wait for the end of the world though, because we’ll see a Ver­i­zon iPhone next sum­mer. Why then? Why not now? Because now doesn’t make sense. Verizon’s CDMA net­work is com­pletely dif­fer­ent from the GSM net­works every iPhone cur­rently uses, both in the United States and abroad. Apple is still mak­ing so much money from AT&T’s iPhones that it’s sim­ply not worth it finan­cially for them to design, build, test and sup­port a dif­fer­ent model on a com­pletely dif­fer­ent cel­lu­lar protocol.

So why does this change next year? Because by next sum­mer, when the 2011 model iPhone is due to be announced, Ver­i­zon will have com­pleted their roll­out of their 4G net­work, based on the LTE pro­to­col. And who else is using LTE? AT&T, T-​Mobile and pretty much the rest of the world other than Sprint. So next sum­mer, when the time is right, Apple will announce the iPhone 4G – see why they didn’t use that moniker this year? – available on AT&T, Ver­i­zon and other LTE net­works worldwide.

So what do you think? Does the glove fit?