WWDC 2009 Keynote Announcement Comments

Updated Notebooks

The first sub­stan­tive announce­ment was updates to the Macbook and Macbook Pro line­ups. I don’t have the patience to detail all of the changes, but you can read up on them here. The gist of the updates are: The Unibody 17, 15, and 13 inch mod­els now all fall under the MacBook Pro label. The poly­car­bon­ate 15-inch Macbook gains an offi­cial place in the lineup. The Macbook Air gets a price drop. Firewire 800 and a Secure Digital card slot are present on all Macbook Pros, regard­less of size. And finally, ExpressCard remains only on the 17-inch Macbook Pro. Notably, although not sur­pris­ingly, miss­ing from the announce­ment was the long dreamed for Apple netbook.

To me, there are some inter­est­ing impli­ca­tions of yesterday’s note­book announce­ments. First, Apple has finally seen the prob­lems inher­ent in main­tain­ing a Macbook vs. Macbook Pro dis­tinc­tion arbi­trar­ily based on screen size and port avail­abil­ity. Now it is clear that Unibody mod­els (except­ing the Air) are to be seen as “pro­fes­sional” machines and the poly­car­bon­ate model(s) are for con­sumers. Of course, one has to won­der if the poly­car­bon­ate lineup will see addi­tional mod­els. I think that the answer to that ques­tion is, “yes.”

Industry pun­dits have been clam­or­ing for Apple to intro­duce a “net­book” com­puter. Apple’s response has con­sis­tently been that they do not think that “net­books” are a mar­ket that they want to com­pete in, but they are watch­ing the space. I too have been watch­ing the net­book space, and I’m see­ing two dis­tinct mar­kets being con­fused as one there. The first mar­ket is the seg­ment of con­sumers who want a rea­son­ably pow­er­ful note­book in the small­est form-factor avail­able. Like it or not, Apple has addressed this mar­ket in the form of the MacBook Air. Apple has stated on more than one occa­sion that the Air is the small­est, most com­pro­mised note­book that they wish to pro­duce. And, at the new $1499 entry-level price point, not hor­ri­bly unreasonable.

The sec­ond “net­book” mar­ket con­sists of con­sumers who want a note­book at the cheap­est pos­si­ble price point. With the poly­car­bon­ate Macbook start­ing at $999 I see a poten­tial move on Apple’s part into that mar­ket. While I doubt we will ever see any­thing like the price-points avail­able from Dell, HP, MSI and com­pany; I would not be sur­prised to see the Macbook lineup dip as low as $799 for a low-end model. The beauty of that strat­egy is that Apple doesn’t need to expend any R&D resources on the project. They can sim­ply keep drop­ping the low-end Macbook price point as faster chips make the cur­rent offer­ings obsolete.

My last thought on the note­book announce­ments has more to do with what was removed than what was gained. Specifically, the removal of ExpressCard from the 15-inch model along with the addi­tion of Firewire 800 to the 13-inch model and a SD slot to the entire range. I was talk­ing to Macworld edi­tor, and fel­low Angry Mac Bastard, Peter Cohen abut the note­book changes when it occurred to me that Apple is hav­ing some­thing of a prob­lem defin­ing just exactly what defines a “pro­fes­sional” in regards to the Macbook Pro lineup.

“Professional” note­book users range from soft­ware devel­op­ers, to musi­cians, to video engi­neers; and the usage pat­terns of each group can vary widely. I fear that, in this incar­na­tion of the Macbook Pro, Apple has catered to the pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phy and video mar­kets, at the expense of oth­ers. Ironically, as Peter pointed out to me, ExpressCard actu­ally would allow the flex­i­bil­ity to address most of the pro­fes­sional mar­kets. On the other hand, from what I’ve seen in var­i­ous fora from the mem­bers of those groups, many pro­fes­sional con­sumers don’t under­stand that point.

MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard

As expected, Apple demoed the next ver­sion of the desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tem, 10.6 Snow Leopard. There were few sur­prises, which is a good thing. As devel­oper Fraser Speirs wrote on Twitter: “…WWDC with no major sur­prises is the best WWDC.” Regardless of that the media pun­di­toc­racy would like. WWDC is about devel­op­ers, and spring­ing major changes on devel­op­ers there is a bad thing. Again, I’ll link to a much bet­ter review of the announce­ments. That being said, a few items that Apple high­lighted stood out.

First, the enhanced Microsoft Exchange sup­port will undoubt­edly be wel­comed by sys­tems admin­is­tra­tors. I know, in my com­pany, many man­ager level employ­ees have begun using their per­sonal Macbook (Pro)s in the office. Drones like me, of course, use what we’re given. Better Exchange inte­gra­tion is one less rea­son to have to boot into Bootcamp or use Parallels/VMware. Personally, as much as it pains me to allow the com­pany addi­tional vec­tors into my life, the abil­ity to access Exchange natively from my home iMac will actu­ally be useful.

The sec­ond part of the Snow Leopard announce­ment that stuck out was the release date and pric­ing. Snow Leopard will be avail­able in September with a price of $29 for those updat­ing from Leopard. I take this as a punch in the junck to every moron ana­lyst or pun­dit who has claimed that Apple is “rest­ing on its lau­rels” and that Windows 7 will “blow Apple away.” The mes­sage to Microsoft is very much, “bring it on mother-fuckers.”

iPhone OS 3.0

Everyone with a func­tion­ing brain expected a iPhone OS 3.0 updated, and Apple deliv­ered. As with Snow Leopard, there really wasn’t much announced that wasn’t expected. The big news is that we learned the release date (June 18) and that AT&T kind of sucks.

iPhone 3Gs

Only and idiot would think that Apple wasn’t going to announce new iPhone hard­ware. (Hi Rob!) You can read the details here, but the bot­tom line is that the 8 GB iPhone 3G is demoted to the newly cre­ated $99 price point and two new mod­els were debuted. The iPhone 3GS at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB, both in black and white. My first thought about this is: Fuck you to all the idiots who fall for the lies of their Chinese “sources.” No matte fin­ish back and no new bezel. Secondly, these are pretty much what I expected. Major hard­ware changes are: an unspec­i­fied set of changes that ren­der every­thing “faster” (I pre­sume that this equates to a faster process and more mem­ory), an incre­men­tal upgrade to oper­ate at the max­i­mum allowed by the cur­rent GSM 3G infra­struc­ture, an upgraded cam­era and a mag­ne­tome­ter to allow the iPhone to act as a com­pass. Yay?

The big story to come out of the 3GS announce­ment is that the above prices are with car­rier com­mit­ment and sub­ject to car­rier upgrade poli­cies. Just like every other fuck­ing phone sold. I have to be hon­est, I have never heard as much self indul­gent whin­ing as I have in the last 24 hours about this “issue.” I don’t even want to write about this any more. I’m ready to just nut-slap the next douche-bag who brings it up.

Ignoring the dip­shit­tery about the pric­ing, I think that the 3GS is a nice incre­men­tal upgrade. Just enough to keep the new pur­chasers com­ing, and a very nice upgrade for the iPhone 2G users who are now just com­ing out of their con­tracts.  Me, I’ll prob­a­bly wait for the inevitable iPhone 4G com­ing next June.

That Which Was Not to Be

Of course, the usual hydro­cephalic mem­bers of the New Media Douchebag pun­di­toc­racy were con­vinced that Apple was going to announce some sort of 10-inch netbook/tablet/marital aid. The main dri­ver of this meme, other than Mike Arrington’s fevered mas­tur­ba­tion ses­sions, was the usual anony­mous Chinese “sources.” Get a clue fuck-wits. Me Chinese, me play joke, me make up stu­pid rumor and laugh at gullible round-eye. When Apple chooses to intro­duce a poten­tially game-changing new device, I guar­an­tee it won’t be to an audi­ence of devel­op­ers. I will be at a spe­cial media event pos­si­bly hosted by a unicorn.

Speaking of myth­i­cal pre­sen­ters. There was a small, but vocal, band of retards who though that His Steveness was going to make a sur­prise appear­ance. Sorry dip­shits, this is the new Apple. When they say that Steve will return at the end of June, they mean the end of June. Deal with it.

So, there you go. All in all a decent WWDC keynote. And I didn’t once try to throt­tle the mon­keys at Douchegadget though the screen.