WWDC 2010 Roundup

Well, there you have it. The WWDC 2010 Keynote has come and gone. The big news, of course, was the new iPhone 4. Additionally Steve Jobs talked about the newly renamed iOS 4 and minor updates to iBooks on the iPad. I’m not going to bother run­ning down the fea­tures of the new OS, Apple cov­ered that dur­ing the spe­cial event ear­lier this year. Nor am I going to go through a detailed list of the specs of the new iPhone. You can get a good run-down of that at Ars Technica. What I do want to talk about are my impres­sions of some of the announce­ments, and in par­tic­u­lar, the reac­tions to them.

iPad and iBooks

There’s not much to say here. Steve did the usual song and dance about how pop­u­lar the iPad is, and intro­duced some new fea­tures in iBooks includ­ing PDF view­ing. There really isn’t much that I can say about the iPad. After a month of using mine it really is as trans­for­ma­tive as Apple makes it out to be and the sales stats show that peo­ple get that. I can only imag­ine with great rel­ish the anguish that that fact causes in all the iPad naysay­ers. Welcome to the new flesh mother-fuckers.

The App Store.

As I said in Twitter dur­ing the Keynote: pay atten­tion bitches because Steve is being crys­tal clear here. Steve stated that Apple sup­ports two plat­forms (actu­ally, I’m sur­prised that few peo­ple noted that he omit­ted the plat­forms that MacOS X sup­ports). The two plat­forms that Steve was refer­ring to are HTML5 and the App Store. Steve made it blaz­ingly fuck­ing clear that Apple con­sid­ers the App Store their own play­ground. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. And, based on sales, the pro­le­tariat seems to like it. Oh how that must chafe.

Farmville

Steve segued neatly from talk­ing about the App Store to talk­ing about apps, fea­tur­ing a demo of Farmville by Zynga, which was imme­di­ately met with groans and deri­sive com­ments online. This shows, yet again, how much the tech press and many devel­op­ers are utterly out of touch with, and con­temp­tu­ous of the aver­age con­sumer elec­tron­ics cus­tomer. For those who bless­edly don’t know, Zynga is the devel­oper of such time-wasting Facebook games as Pirates, Mafia Wars and the Keynote-featured Farmville. What do these games do? Precious fuck­ing lit­tle, but the masses seem to enjoy them. In fact, one of the most com­mon rea­sons to include Flash on the iOS devices amongst peo­ple I talk to are these games. Now, I think that these games are worth­less wastes of time, but the dif­fer­ence is that I can acknowl­edge that I’m not a main­stream cus­tomer. The pres­ence of Zynga on the iOS plat­form will be huge.

The iPhone

Jesus, where to fuck­ing begin. Seriously, just go read the Ars report on the dam thing. Suffice it to say that the new iPhone is an amaz­ing piece of kit. I’ll be buy­ing one as soon as I can. Now on to some spe­cific thoughts.

Jizzmodo

Of course, the white ele­phant in the room was Jizzmodo’s leak of the iPhone 4 pro­to­type ear­lier this year. As much fun as it was read­ing Jizzmodo’s idi­otic “Metaliveblog” where they re-created the expe­ri­ence of steal­ing an iPhone by steal­ing cov­er­age of the iPhone announce­ment, over­all their per­for­mance was just sad. What really jumped out at me was just how lit­tle those ass-clowns man­aged to reveal about the new iPhone. Even tak­ing into account the fact that they couldn’t access the oper­at­ing sys­tem, the things that they missed: screen tech­nol­ogy, cam­era tech­nol­ogy, the fact that the metal side­walls are part of the RF antenna sys­tem, just go to show how utterly incom­pe­tent those hacks are.

Cameras

I’m glad that Steve Jobs took the oppor­tu­nity to point out that the race to cram as many photo-sensors into the tini­est chip size is a fools errand, and does noth­ing to deliver what con­sumers actu­ally want, which is the abil­ity to take bet­ter pic­tures. On the other hand, I’m utterly ambiva­lent to the whole front-facing cam­era FaceTime video-chat thing. Perhaps I’m wrong. Honestly I’d be tick­led if I was, since the theme of this post is that the pun­di­toc­racy doesn’t have the fog­gi­est clue what real con­sumers want or need. I’d enjoy the irony.

iMovie

Speaking of cam­eras. Apple just shot the Flip (and related hand-held HD video cam­eras) in the junk. I know that I’ll still carry my Canon SD960 IS with me, at least at first, but I don’t know for how long. I’m actu­ally san­guine about that though, as it will give me the excuse to move up to the Olympus E-PL1 for my fancy-pants cam­era. What I would like to see, and there is no tech­ni­cal rea­son why it can’t hap­pen, is a com­bi­na­tion of iMovie on the iPad and a iPad Camera Kit that sup­ports the iPhone 4. Now that would be my dream rig.

Pricing

I’m some­what dis­ap­pointed that the iPhone 4 is avail­able in the same stor­age con­fig­u­ra­tions as the iPhone 3GS (16 & 32 GB). Coming from a 16GB iPhone 3G I was hop­ing to jump to 32GB and save a c-note. On the other hand, I’ve still never used more than 12 GB of my cur­rent stor­age, and won’t even use that much now that I have an iPad. Also, It is obvi­ous that Apple put a pre­mium on cram­ming as much bat­tery into the iPhone 4 as they could. It seems like a good trade-off for now.

Parting Thoughts

Since I wasn’t at the Keynote, I’ll have to quote Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng quot­ing Steve Jobs

Apple is not just a tech­nol­ogy com­pany: it’s more than that. It’s the mar­riage of that plus the human­i­ties that dis­tin­guishes Apple. It’s the hard­ware and soft­ware work­ing together, com­ing up with A4 chips that work with the soft­ware and give us incred­i­ble bat­tery lives. It’s not just a front fac­ing cam­era, it’s a front fac­ing cam­era and 18 months’ worth of work to come up with soft­ware that you’ll never even notice when you want to place a video call. A com­plete solu­tion so all of us don’t have to be sys­tem integrators.

This, more than any­thing else is what the vast major­ity of the tech press just doesn’t get about Apple. Apple isn’t going to act like Google, or Microsoft, or Dell because the way that those com­pa­nies do busi­ness is anti­thet­i­cal to what Apple is. And, ulti­mately, there is noth­ing wrong with that. “Highlanderism” (it tick­les me that that term has gained trac­tion) is stu­pid. The world smart-phone mar­ket is suf­fi­ciently large that Apple, Android, RIM and who­ever else is in play can all hap­pily sur­vive by cater­ing to the needs of their users, not the other guys. If you don’t like the iPhone, stop your weep­ing and buy and Android phone. There’s more than enough choice out there for all of us, and the choices just got that much better.