June 08, 2009
WWDC 2009 Wrap Up

Sorry I was away all day folks, had a day of driving around... I did catch some of Apple's WWDC. Here's the wrap-up (for the 3 of you who haven't heard so far) and the highlights:


  • New MacBook Pro 13" model (cool if you want something more portable).
  • Snow Leopard will have better multi-core support, re-written 64bit finder, exchange support, lots of funky APIs, etc. So what? Oh, and the upgrade price will be $29. That's a bit of a big deal, when you're paying $399 for Vista Ultimate, and even when Apple folks are used to paying the Apple Tax of $129 for the OS/X upgrades. Course, $29 is the upgrade price too, I think the "full boxed" version is still $129 though. Coming September sometime.
  • New Quicktime with less UI. Snow Leopard only I think.
  • Something about a new iPhone.

    • Same form factor as the old one (which is now $99).
    • 16/32Gb vs 8/16Gb from previous versions (expected)
    • Faster processor (cool)
    • Video shooting/editing/sharing from iPhone (cool, not my thing)
    • 3mp camera with autofocus and macro (cool, probably still crappy compared to my 14mp DSLR though :) )
    • Voice control, iPhone now recognizes your contacts for calling and iPod artists and songs (potentially very cool)
    • Compass (needed for turn-by-turn driving I guess, other than that, meh)
    • Tons of software improvements in iPhone OS 3.0, but these were already known and demonstrated in March.

  • iPhone OS 3.0 and the new iPhone 3Gs available starting June 17th.

So that's about the wrapup from the high level view, I think I got the major points. Honestly I'm not hugely impressed, as usual. Lots of new stuff, but nothing mindblowing. I guess every year can't be like the release of the original iPhone. I think most of my disappointment is that probably 90% of the new coolness of the iPhone 3Gs is in the software, which is available to all iPhones, and was shown off months ago.

As a counter point of course, Paul Thorrott (Windows guy, but someone who I respect a lot) has a reality check for the fanboys out there. Some of his points are very valid as usual, some seem a bit snarky and like a killjoy :) Still, a counter point that's needed.





Posted by Arcterex at June 08, 2009 10:49 PM
Comments

I think you are missing one REALLY sweet thing. For those of us who bought our iPhone thorugh Rogers with the 6GB plan, we get to take advantage of the new tethering features for FREE. No need for a Rogers 'stick' on a different plan :-)

10 more days. How sweet it is!


Posted by: Dana Epp on June 9, 2009 10:12 AM

That I didn't know... is there a URL for it? Very sweet!

Just read that the voice control is a 3Gs feature, not an OS 3.0 feature, which irks me a bit :( Still...


Posted by: Arcterex on June 9, 2009 7:45 PM
Post a comment
Name:


Email Address:


URL:


Comments:


Remember info?