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Apple's WWDC Unveils iPhone 3.0, OpenCL, Laptop Updates, and More
Lots of big news from WWDC today including updates to almost all of Apple's laptops. They added a 13-inch version to the MacBook Pro line, updated the MacBook Air, and added a few new ports to some of the machines including an SD slot and firewire 800 port. Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard. The iPhone got quite a bit of love in 3.0, much of it just confirming older news. Cut, copy, and paste, shake to undo, developer APIs, Cocoa Touch support for text, landscape mode updates, spotlight, and MMS all made the bullet list. You will now also be able to rent and purchase movies directly from your iPhone. Other new features in 3.0 include the much debated tethering ability, allowing you to use your iPhone as a cellular modem (unfortunately there was no mention of AT&T actually supporting this feature, a wonder there wasn't a riot), integrated TomTom GPS navigation, and game features galore. New functionality also allows you to locate your iPhone via MobileMe, play a sound to help you locate it (regardless if it is set to silent), and even wipe your data remotely. The New iPhone hardware updates, "3GS", adds a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, voice interfaces, twice the processing power, and hardware encryption. The 3GS comes in 16GB ($199) and 32GB ($299), pushing the 3G (which they are keeping on the market) to $99. Lots of other small updates amidst the bustle, looks like another successful WWDC.
Come on. Not just for video chat, but for ordinary photos. For those of you who have ever tried to take a picture of yourself with friends using an iPhone, you know my pain.
Has Apple been this abrasive to their competitors during the keynotes before? It was a little tacky IMO
they're still married to AT&T....
It's all the rage now.
Gotta get that "OMG I HEARD THIS ON TWITTER 2 SECONDS AGO" reader to see it without scrolling.
I hope there's good security on the auto-locate feature. Aside from the obvious "prank" of remotely wiping someone's iphone, I can also see this being abused for such things as spying on people's locations, or perhaps less invasive but more annoying... a "loved one" forcing your phone to ring when you already set it to silent for a meeting or movie.
Am I the only one who hates the shake interface for any action at all? Half the time I don't shake it hard enough, so I have to do it again. And for something like undo, it takes your eyes off what you're trying to do... or undo. I realize there are limited inputs on a device with few hard buttons, but hope there's an alternate way.
Can't Apple produce 15" or 13" laptops without that damn glossy display? These mirrors mounted on laptops get really annoying, and I'm not the only one who thinks that non-glossy displays are superior to their allegedly cheaper glossy displays.
One more guy who's looking for a used MBP on ebay.
Umm, encryption of...what, exactly?
Are we talking about the flash drive being encrypted? Are we talking about the iPhone finally supporting PGP?
What would be their allegations in such a suit? What agreement has Apple broken? What law has apple violated?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Considering that the iPhone itself is really a small form-factor computer with communication abilities built in, the line has already been so blurred between phone and computer that I can't see how that fact that another computer can also access the Internet through the connection is all that different. Especially since you, the customer are paying to have the ability to transfer a given number of bits per month. Why should it even matter -- except to anal companies like AT&T who what to sell you capacity and then prevent you from actually using it -- the eventual destination of those bits? How it tethering even different from storing the downloaded data in an iPhone and transferring it later to another device?
Answer: It isn't!
The same for VoIP. It's all just bits being sent and received. Now create a business model that acknowledges this axiom.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, it IS a developer's conference.
Just sayin'.
Yeah that sucks, what the hell is wrong with Apple, why not keep the two of them as options. Now the only expansion comes from a single FW800 port. This is where Windows laptops do it better, they give you the card reading slots, and the Express slot. Apple did the right thing with the 13" but went backwards with the 15", not even bothering to update the 17" with them both, where its size would have allowed it! A CF reader would have been better for the Pro shooters. I'd rather have this than the inclusive price drop.
But at least we know its an Apple SD card reader so it must be better! I wonder if it can read the other 3 card formats that are the same size like windows laptops, seriously sucks hard if it is just SD. Why bother.
Jonathanjk.com
If your biggest problem is that your latest product upgrade isn't as exciting as the initial launch of said product, well that's not such a bad place to be.
Apple has consistently released new iPods for years, but not every one was a giant step over the last. And people complained that the change wasn't that exciting. But they kept selling truckloads of the little things, and they'll probably keep selling iPhones as well.
I don't know what sort of huge innovations you were expecting. Apple has spent a lot of effort in creating the iPhone as a platform, served by the app store. They're not going to release something so incredibly different that it fractures that platform "eco-system". They're going to be very careful about releasing hardware that will result in apps that aren't backwards compatible with the phones already out there.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
FTA: and OpenCL a new open graphics standard
Not quite. ...a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.
OpenCL is like CUDA, but supposed to be more open along the lines of OpenGL, hence the name. The same guys who manage OpenGL (Khronos) manage OpenCL as well. You could probably use it to do graphics, but that would be stupid.
Why would it be so stupid? OpenGL sucks for doing specialized graphics work; it's designed to be a noisy, triangle-pushing machine, not for Photoshop quality images in non-realtime. OpenCL fits the bill as the ultimate photo studio accelerator more so than any other API does at the moment.
OpenCL might have been designed to be a generalized compute API, but 9/10 of the apps that immediately use it in the first few months will be graphical applications (Photoshop & imitators, maybe Adobe's Flash), with the 10th being someone's Big Budget sound studio app (Reason/Live/etc). It will be months before anyone has general utility of the API.
MagSafe power port
Gigabit Ethernet port
One FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps)
Three USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps)
Mini DisplayPort
Audio line in
Audio line out
ExpressCard/34 slot
Kensington lock slot
Buy a third party product for your card reading needs.My Sony Cybershot 10.3 MP Carl Zeiss model has video out and USB. I'm not complaining.
Ouch, that's a costly upgrade, when the same thing in an SD card is roughly $20.
There is always something better just over the horizon. If you are a big Jobs devotee then you should have known better than to buy something just before WWDC. That is a MASSIVE NERD FAIL.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seeing Apple jump on board with HTML 5 and especially the video/audio tags is huge. If Apple is right that they own 65% of mobile browsing; having them stay up to date with standards is huge and ought to set the tone for others.
two fails do not make a win
it would be different if they said, "in 1 year, there will be this blah blah blah phone for $199" because that would have given the consumers a chance to decide if they want to go ahead with the massive $199 purchase or wait to get something that is better for the same price.
Yeah, so people like you would hold off on buying a phone for 5 months? Why would Apple do that to themselves? They much rather have you buy a phone in Feb and then the newer one a year later.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Just do not fully understand Apple's poo-pooing the netbook space. I see a Netbook as a supplement to my bigger system, that I prefer not to carry.
Netbooks don't have the profit margins that Apple desires. Simple as that.
The iPhone 3.0 software release date has been given as June 17th although apparently paid developers can get the GM copy now.
You'd think a detail like that could have found its way into the summary somewhere...
He purchased the phone in February! That's 4-5 months ago. He didn't get "screwed" out of a better phone, he's just bitching that his phone is now last years model. But hey, unreasonable bitching never stopped slashdotters, so while we're wishing for an upgrade discount, why stop at 4-5 months, why not more? Shit, I bought my mac desktop 5 years ago and they've upgraded it since then 3-4 times including changing processors AND operating systems on me, why shouldn't I get an upgrade discount on that? By the GP's logic, Apple should never update their products because people keep buying their existing products. Sorry dude, welcome to the world of electronics, they get upgraded on a yearly or bi-yearly basis and the very minute you buy your product, there is a finite probability you will wake up tomorrow and it will be out of date.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
$29 isn't a bad price.
2007 : Vista and Mac OS X Leopard launch. Vista users talk about the high ongoing cost of Mac OS X upgrades because they occur every 18 months. Mac users say the trend is for longer gaps between OS launches, and that XP->Vista was uncharacteristically long.
30 months later: Windows 7 and Snow Leopard launch at roughly the same time. Snow Leopard costs $29 to upgrade ($129 new). Windows 7 Home Premium: $260 (rumoured). Linux: Still free.
I have also read the official press release from Apple (not sure if it is already released yet, but it should be soon) and it also mentions OpenGL ES 2.0, so I think you got your upgrade after all :)
You're telling me that an SD slot can fit on my cell phone, but not on my MacBook? That the MacBook is just so chock-full of goodness that adding an SD slot would just be "too much"?
Who are you shitting?
It looks to me like someone at Apple thought they could coast for another few quarters, and then there was a little bit of excitement over the Pre and suddenly Apple is trying to make it look like they're really doing something.
If Apple wants to do something exciting, let them come out with a full-size, expandable computer that doesn't start at $5k. Better yet, let them finally catch up with the other OS manufacturers and release an OS that can be used on a machine besides the ones that Apple sells.
Now that would be exciting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
looks like another successful WWDC.
Well, that really depends on how you define success. If you think that they succeeded because they made it through mostly unscathed and that it ended and everyone went home, then you're probably right. Their share price even managed to recover to nearly the same value by closing.
However, most people expect more from Apple than a few minor tweaks and "refreshes", especially regarding the iPhone. Their presentation basically restated, bullet by bullet, everything that had been leaked to date. Nothing new or inspiring, and some things that weren't so inspiring (thanks, AT&T, for nothing). There wasn't even a "One More Thing".
No visions for the future. Nothing innovative, inspiring, or even interesting. In all, it was an ordinary, if not downright boring, conference that promised nothing but More of the Same.
The $99 phone is the big news the rest of it is just nice.
Because saving a hundred bucks off the ~$1700 total is such a bargain?
This guy's the limit!
An iPhone is a poor investment. Here's a tip; they'll release a better phone next year, and the 3GS will be worth less.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
I'm sure it cost apple a considerable amount to develop and have a manufacturing line for the second version of the iPhone, and I'm willing to bet that the vast bulk of iPhones sold will be the 16gb model. Therefore, they have to amortize the development costs over a smaller market for the larger memory size. It's not really about the cost of the memory, it's about the additional R&D and the cost of having a second assembly line.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Property is an investment. Commodities are investments. Stocks and bonds are investments. iPhones are tech toys.
This is something that worried me before the keynote.
The change from Open GL ES 1.1 (original Iphone & 3G) to ES 2.0 (3GS) is significant. The key thing to note is that 2.0 (shader-based) is NOT 100% backward-compatible with 1.1, meaning a code update will be forced. I expect the majority of 3d engines to remain in the ES1.1 API for a long time (6 months+) or as long as the majority of devices in consumers hands only support it. ...then again I only do freelance work - I'm sure the larger dev studios can throw a person or two at the problem and have it worked out in a week.
sigh.
Very, very far behind. It's not really $99--that's probably no more than a third the total price. You pay the rest off on time as part of your AT&T subscription.
I think you minunderstand what "revolutionary" means. A 64bit kernel isn't revolutionary, nor is adding exchange support. These are evolutionary changes. Your buying into Apple hype.
AMD's hypertransport was revolutionary, microwave ovens were revolutionary and not all revolutionary ideas have to be popular (see Office 2007's menu system). Taking a 32bit/64bit hybrid OS and making it purely 64bit is evolutionary.
Wow, I can get a 3G for $99? I'll take one! Oh wait, I have to pay how much on the contract?
I do wish the media would stop parroting these utterly irrelevant "costs" for mobile devices straight from the press release, as if it was true or something.
AC is brain dead for not realizing that All Engineering & Science intensive application suites will leverage OpenCL, across all platforms.
And I'm not talking about a camera flash either! Its been two years and there still is no flash support? I know it must be ATT holding things back, but come on, at least let us have flash enabled over Wi-Fi.
Better yet, let them finally catch up with the other OS manufacturers and release an OS that can be used on a machine besides the ones that Apple sells.
That's not catching up, that's stepping down. Once you support generic hardware, there's nothing you can do about Cheap Chinese Chop selling the crappiest crap ever and your customers blaming you for the resulting crashes. MS knows that, and I'm pretty sure if they had a chance to dig themselves out of that hole, they would.
Apple intends to simply stay out of the hole in the first place.
Plus, they're still mostly a hardware company.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Apple was clearly not pleased with AT&T regarding MMS and tethering. If AT&T had a good reason, Apple would have held these features back until AT&T could be ready. In fact, it might well be the case that Apple already *did* hold these features back, as much as a year, and AT&T still isn't ready. Apple is inviting their audience to complain to AT&T. I recommend that AT&T receive a call from all of you iPhone customers who are annoyed by this.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I, too, don't understand why Apple decided to replace the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot on a supposedly pro-level notebook.
They explained it clearly in the keynote. Less then 1% of users used ExpressCard. Over 90% of users owned cameras that use SD cards. Most users don't like using USB to hook up their cameras. ExpressCard is still available on the 17" MacBook Pro, because they acknowledge there are professional uses for it.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
If what you say about MS and holes is true, why don't they just eliminate software sales to the general public and just limit it to a few official blessed vendors, so they can maintain strict integrated quality control?
Because they are just as locked-in to their own trap as everyone else. The moment they do something big and obvious like that, millions of consumers will start looking for alternatives.
Yes, you're right that they are very obviously not stopping to sell to everyone. That is exactly the trap I mean. MS survives because it is everywhere. Monopoly, lock-in, whatever you call it. They can't stop doing that or the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org