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