So what did everyone think of the WWDC announcementsannouncement?

I was personally shocked at the upgrade price for Snow Leopard. $29 seems too cheap for an operating system, even an upgrade.

i bet a lot of people would be willing to pay that to get it, rather then putting in teh effort to torrent it...

Yup. The family pack which provides 5 copies is $49 which is a pretty amazing price. Granted there is no DRM or serial numbers so one wouldn't have to buy the family pack, but I bet a lot do.

So it comes out a month before Windows 7 and is cheaper than the $50 upgrade price Windows users have to pay

as per the iPhone, kinda lame updates, video and better cam is sweet, but COMPASS........

x2 speed nice, but really nothing that is overly amazing.

I would agree that there was nothing too exciting about the new iPhone. I would however disagree about the compass in the iPhone being lame. The Google G1 has had a compass since launch, the primary use being to aid the GPS. Eg. When you are walking down a street or looking a map, it will show you which direction you are facing. Figuring out which direction you're going along longer streets or those with poorly marked cross streets can be a pain in the ass. The other cool thing you can do on the G1 with it, is to use it to navigate street view. When you are facing one side the the street, it will show you that side of the street in street view.


The video and even the speed bump seem a little lame to me as other phones already have those things features.

The one thing we haven't talked about is the price drop. The old 3G is now $99 and the new iPhone starts at $199. I'm curious if this reflects a more competitive pricing model of if AT&T will be raising data prices/rates to subsidize the new phone. For example, Sprint requires the Palm Pre device to have a higher priced data plan in order to subsidize the phone (makes it look cheaper). We'll probably get an idea of this when a non-contract phone price is announced.

Besides the touch screen, which is a tech advantage but not a spec advantage, the iPhone really has never stood far ahead of the pack. The speed and capacity upgrades are just the march of time and I wouldn't call them lame, just keeping up with the Jones's. The video camera is a catch-up move, but in true Apple fashion they're going to make the interface beautiful and damn simple (ever tried video on a BlackBerry? not easy or pretty). That's the real thing Apple succeeds with in each generation of the iPhone, the new features are nice to use.

Back on the Mac side, a few things seemed to have slipped beneath some people's radar though they're definitely interesting moves. With the addition of the Firewire 800 port and SD Card slot on the 13", they've silently dropped the Line In port. This isn't too much of a loss, with most people doing casual chatting via the built-in mic and there are many options for USB and Bluetooth headsets. Still, it's one less thing there and I liked the capability the handful of times I used it. Actually, I just looked closely at the tech specs, you can use the headphone jack as an analog line in, so they're keeping the capability, sweet.

Much more noticeable is the dropping of the Express Card slot on the 15" in favor of the SD Card slot. This has riled up a fair number of people on the Apple forums (but that happens with every bloody change Apple makes). Whereas the SD Card slot was a nice bonus on the 13", here it seems unnecessary. People we already used to getting there pictures via USB and for the folks who wanted an SD Card slot, you could get an Express Card adapter. While I don't think this will hurt the mobile broadband folks too much (most providers seem to offer USB now anyway) it means compromises for the A/V folks. You can't drive both a camera and a hard drive through a single Firewire port so the Express Card picked up the slack but now that's no longer an option. Dropping Firewire on the first aluminum MacBook seemed to be a step backward, but it could also be seen as a long time coming, this can't. Express Card is much younger, most versatile, and still an expanding market. It's amazingly flexible and, if the longevity of PCMCIA can be taken as any sort of example, here to stay.

I've never looked at the bottom of the new 17", but with both the 13" and 15" moving to integrated batteries, will the hard drives and RAM remain easily accessible? Also, I fully support the move to the new batteries. The extra capacity will obviously improve life, but it'll also mean it will last for longer before the lifespan becomes too short to be useful. The price for replacement is in line with the price of most first-party battery replacements, and a better deal for the capacity than most other brands. The one issue I see for the common user is losing your computer for a day or two to get the battery replaced. I hope this becomes a common in store service.

A $29 upgrade is Apple's love letter to developers. With the amount of stuff that's changed under the hood, it's going to be very hard for major applications to not become "10.6 only" overnight, especially if all those new and updated APIs are half as attractive as I expect them to be. With such a core focused release Apple is trying to leapfrog Windows 7 and Linux in delivering a platform that takes real advantage of today's and tomorrow's hardware. I think this is going to be a real generational shift in application development in OS X. They've been stringing it out over the past couple releases, dropping new APIs in side-by-side with the old ones, but at some point you need to put your foot down, say all aboard who's coming aboard, and drop the older platforms. $29 will hopefully lure the majority of the user base across to 10.6 and onto all the new APIs so that Apple can slowly cut ties with the 10.0-10.5 crowd and go back to $129 upgrades without having to worry about cross-release compatibility.

With the consolidation of the aluminum into the Pro line and the continuing case issues with the white MacBooks, they need to redo the white shell. I have a feeling that after dropping all these new machines at the beginning of the summer to generate sales in the upper tiers, they'll still do a consumer laptop refresh in October in line with their normal release schedule and at that point they'll revamp the white MacBook. However, we still probably won't see Core i7 in an Apple laptop until 4th quarter, 2010, which means I'll be getting a new 13" MacBook Pro soon because I can't wait that long.

I've got a dedicated camera button on my phone. I can slide to the right or left (granted joypad lol) to toggle between pictures and video. Apple's interface is pretty much the same with regards to the toggle. I guess the only reason this was left out prior was to keep component cost down. It's good they have it but I would say it was hardly worth making a big deal of, which Apple did.



Yeah. I read this late last night. Seems really silly to have an SD card slot instead of a express card slot. Many of the high end cameras use the larger CF instead of the SD. For modems, there are lots of good USB modems and bluetooth is an option, albeit a battery drainer and higher latency.

But you're right in that this screws lots of people at little gain. Imagine if you need to use ESATA.


USB audio adapters are an adequate replacement. I think most are okay with this and that it does make sense to do.



I'm okay with the idea of the battery being integrated from a longevity point of view. I sort of cringe when I see the option to have a second battery that you could swap in the middle of a long day taken away. I'm not sure how many others do this but when I'm mobile and a device runs down, I use my laptop to charge it. This is why I'm fine with have a non-swappable battery in my phone, ipod, etc.

With the new laptop, you need to maybe have a battery brick or something in your laptop bag so that you can still have that extra juice to keep your other things charged for long trips.



I hope so because the crackbook plastic is going to piss off consumers and will cause them higher costs in the long run.

All companies make some show of adding functionality like that, your ear is just that much closer to Apple and the media pays them that much more attention.

Back in the day, our V330s could take VGA pictures and 176x144 video (my current phone, which is admittedly two years old, takes the same quality video). Apple waited to put video into the iPhone until they could have VGA at 30 fps and enough processor power to add a pretty nice video editor. VGA at 30 fps is what camcorders shoot, granted with better processing and a nice lens. No matter what the quality actually is, Apple is going to make sure it looks damn nice on the iPhone and plays smooth as butter. Sure other phones have video, but in true Apple style, they make damn sure everyone will be playing catchup to have their level of video. For stuff like this, Apple is always late to the party but sets the bar when they do arrive. No matter the marginal level of actual technical achievement and improvement in adding video, Apple will tout it like the reinvention of sliced bread because that is how their marketing works to maintain their brand. You complain about this same thing every time, that they over emphasize the lame updates, but that is exactly what they need to do to craft the kind of image the mainstream has of the iPhone.

I watched the Mac portion of the keynote. Schiller actually lays out a case for the SD Card slot on the 15", explaining that fewer than 1% of users utilized it, but that they are keeping it on the 17" for specific high end solutions like audio. While that is an okay argument, it still makes no sense technology wise and almost insultingly marginalizes pro users, especially video folks.

I concede.



We should maybe reverse this a little bit. Remember when the floppy was the standard? Well Apple went against the floppy because it was technically inferior than a other USB storage mechanisms and CD media.

This is like the exact opposite. They're taking away something that is clearly technically superior and adding something inferior. Couldn't they have just left the express card slot and provided a SD card adapter?

My theory is they just looked at netbooks and were like "how can we capture the netbook market?"

On a side note, iPhone/iTouch 3.0 is really really awesome. Listening to streaming radio over my iPod touch, over bluetooth headphones. Yes, they added really good A2DP support for the 2nd gen touch. You can now also run wifi with the screen turned off which was my biggest complaint. Very good update IMO.

Hopefully 10.6 will be as good.

Full retail for the new iphone 32 gig - $699.

AT&T is gonna be hiking the data plan rates to subsidize this.