Mac OS Lion! A New MacBook Air! FaceTime for Macs! See How Well We Predicted Apple’s Annoucement

We've got to admit, despite the fact it's a little underpowered, the new MacBook Air looks pretty sweet.

Apple‘s announcement today was, as we predicted, chock full of action. While we’ll go into some detail below as far as things relate to our forecast, there’s no shortage of more detailed roundups to be had.

Our overall impression? This was one of the more predictable Apple announcements in a while, with the new MacBook Air and much of Mac OS X Lion turning out much as expected. Still, that’s not saying much as FaceTime for Mac and the Mac App Store caught us (and likely a few software vendors) completely off guard.

Time for results!

(As per usual, our predictions are in italics, followed by the actual result. Commentary and grades follow below.)

In the MacBook Air category…

• 11″ and 13″ screen sizes available
  Boom! Totally obvious, based on the rumors, sure, but also totally correct! We also happen to think these babies look pretty sweet, seeming like almost the perfect marriage of notebooks and netbooks that has eluded other manufacturers for so long.
  Grade: A
• 8 hours or more of battery life
  So close, but with Steve reporting 7 hours of web surfing for the 13-inch model and 5 for the 11-incher, we’re off here. We’re comforted by the fact that Steve says their battery estimates are much more conservative than the typical estimates, and combined with 30 days of standby life for both models, we feel we did pretty well.
  Grade: B
• Flash-based storage
  Another fish, another barrel. Again, leaks and rumors made this pretty easy, but we were still right. Our only concern is that at a maximum of 256GB (on the high end $1600 version), Apple probably needs some sweet cloud-storage solution to make these really compelling, as most people will likely end up with a 64GB or 128GB model.
  Grade: A

In the Mac OS X category…

• New Mac OS name: “Lion”
  Correctamundo. As nice as it was to get this right, this was the most obvious prediction we’ve ever made.
  Grade: A
• Integration of iOS features including scrollbars.
  The one piece of iOS integration introduced in today was expanded gesture controls (which we don’t count since Macs have supported gestures for a while), as well as a couple of features like apps autosaving and remembering where you left off. The desktop Mac App Store is the big reveal in this category, and we have to say that at least on the surface it seems to be a potential game-changer. Still, to be honest, we were more focused on things like scrollbars, so our grade reflects this discrepancy.
  Grade: B-
• A mechanism for iOS application interaction with Mac OS
  For a brief, brieft instant we held out hope that the Mac OS App Store would somehow connect to our iOS App store, and maybe even allow connected apps, but alas, the Mac App Store looks to be a completely separate entity.
  Grade: F

And in the miscellaneous category…

• iOS 4.2 release the week of November 8th.
  Nothing whatsoever on this.
  Grade: F
• iLife 11,the demise of iDVD and an entirely new app.
  We scored a hit on another easy call with the new iLife, but also scored a huge miss as there was no new iLife app and iDVD remains part of the suite.
  Grade: C-
• Absolutely nothing about a Verizon iPhone.
  Completely correct, as there was nothing about iPhones at all.
  Grade: A
• An availability announcement regarding the White iPhone 4
  Completely incorrect, as there was nothing about iPhones at all.
  Grade: F

Overall, our As don’t balance out our Fs, and for a final grade we’d have to say we earned a C-. In some ways the fairly concrete rumors and leaks made this the easiest Apple announcement to predict in quite some time, but we completely whiffed nearly any time we strayed from them and we completely missed the (long-overdue) introduction of FaceTime for the Mac.

All in all, it was a middling day for our predictive abilities, but a great day for Apple fans.