If you put together my 2011 predictions so far they create a world view of tech culture and business as I see it for the coming year. Each prediction builds on the others until we get to these last two, which present a couple boffo conclusions, the big question being “What does Apple need with a 500,000 (soon to be one million) square foot data center in rural North Carolina?”
First we have Apple working to kill small hard drives. We’ll shortly see Apple also killing optical drives in its notebooks. This is to save money, space, and weight, sure, but it is mainly to limit local storage. We need local storage, but Steve doesn’t want […]
This year will see the end of the iPod Classic and with it the 1.8-inch disk drive, 90 percent of which are sold by Toshiba. This is a testament to the rise of flash memory and Solid State Disk (SSD) drives, but that’s not the only cause or the only result, because I predict that late in the year the venerable 3.5-inch disk form factor will hit end-of-life, too.
Apple bought a huge piece of Bay Area property for a new corporate campus, promising to develop the land into an enormous project that would allow thousands of company employees to live, work, shop and play without ever having to leave company property. It would be the perfect community for staffers who are allowed to work any 80 hours per week they choose. This may sound a lot like 
No insider info here, no leaked secrets, just an aging but wily geek putting himself in the place of Verizon Wireless and guessing how that mobile carrier will handle next year’s rumored iPhone introduction on its U. S. network. I’d go for a knockout punch and I think Verizon will, too.