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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.
Gained sd card reader...lost the express card slot. I want the express card slot back.
There's always been a bit of a gap between the $100 (low cost) and the $200 (high cost) smartphones, the Pearl vs the 8820 in blackberry land, for example. With a $99 pricetag the 3G (hardware, at least, the data contract is still damned expensive)is now in line with all of the low-end smartphones currently on the market. With Apple taking a 30% cut on app sales plus a share of the AT&T contract price, it makes sense to push the cost of last generation's hardware down. As much as I and probably a lot of others would love to see a more open platform (Android or Linux, for example) gain ground in the mobile space, this will make it a lot harder to establish a sizable marketshare for the platforms that are more recently emerging into the market.
Still, Android has a shot to build (and surpass) the app library of the iPhone by moving bottom up in terms of price-point. A large number of low to midrange phones running Android could give the platform the customer base it needs to support a large development community which would in turn help build the platform's maturity eventually leading to advanced smartphones with a large and diverse assortment of apps available. This would be almost the reverse of how the iPhone platform grew: starting out as a premium hardware and service, now working down to cheaper hardware to leverage growing revenue streams from a large app library and contracts from the installed (and growing) base. Philosophically and practically (monoculture is typically a bad thing) I would love to see Android succeed on a large scale in the marketplace but as much as I often disagree with Apple's stylistic choices and UI design I have to give kudos for how well they've executed the iPhone and app store as a business.
Correction: In the USA, AT&T is the exclusive provider. In Canada, Rogers and Fido (same company basically) offer the iPhone, officially.
æeee!
I, too, don't understand why Apple decided to replace the ExpressCard slot with an SD slot on a supposedly pro-level notebook.
The ExpressCard slot provided the only high-speed expansion option on Apple's notebooks. Maybe I'd understand this move if there was a docking station available that added other expansion options, but there isn't.
I do a lot of photography and often shoot gigabytes of raw photos in a single shoot with my dSLR (which uses CF, not SD). Yeah, the sort of work the MacBook Pro is supposed to be aimed at. Besides that, I also do a lot of work with large disk images for the IT work I do.
Doing such work on my aging MBP is a joy because I have an ExpressCard Serial ATA adapter that lets me use external hard drives without the limitations and overhead of USB, FireWire or ethernet. If I wanted, I could also use the card to connect to an external RAID enclosure at SATA II speeds.
What good are the performance increases with the CPU, memory, graphics, etc if the only expansion option that provided the quickest data transfer speeds is now gone? Disk i/o will be an even worse bottleneck for me on a new MBP than my old one. No thanks.
I was looking to upgrade my 2.5 year old MBP with a newer model, but I refuse to do so until Apple brings back an ExpressCard slot or something better.
Seriously, I've only made it a quarter of the way through this thing and I've already come to the conclusion that they could have held this conference with no new product/feature announcements and it still would have been a huge success as long as they bashed Microsoft and Windows 7 for most of it.
Apple is hip, and its hip to hate PC!
The only Jobs presentation I've been to was for the unveiling of the NeXT and it already was like that (adjust for Windows/DOS versions).
Since then I've never managed to look at one of those things in whole. It just looks too much like a cultist rally or something.
May contain traces of nut.
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