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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.
"Get Some" which Apple execs were rumored to have yelled at rival Palm execs while squeezing their junk.
Gained sd card reader...lost the express card slot. I want the express card slot back.
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.
Posting these minute-by-minute conference updates and them appearing on the page backwards?
It seems like I just read some E3 updates laid out in the same manner last week and now I wonder if that article was from Endgadget as well or if this is becoming a common practice.
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....
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.
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
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.
To be clear, the updates to OS X referred to are features of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) which will ship in September and cost $29. It is not an update to 10.5 and is not yet available outside of developer previews.
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.
Not great but good. The $99 phone is the big news the rest of it is just nice. I like the voice controls, compass, and video but nothing is earth shattering. I do think Palm will provide some much needed competition for the iPhone. The difference in a two year contract runs a few hundred dollars and the Pre offers a keyboard which some people really want. If you can not tether on AT&T then it is just a big slap in the face for US customers. I hope Palm/Sprint will enable that feature on the Pre when they see how bent people are at AT&T over it. Now we need Android on some networks besides T-Mobile and we can start seeing a real three way fight.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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?
Requires new two-year AT&T wireless service contract, sold separately to qualified customers; credit check required; must be 18 or older. For non-qualified customers, including existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G, the price with a new two-year agreement is $499 (8GB), $599 (16GB), or $699 (32GB). (from http://www.apple.com/iphone/buy/) Kudos for the new corporate aftertaste and giant spanking to current customers!
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'.
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.
Mod the unbeliever straight down to hell!
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.
Since most higher-level dSLRs use Compact Flash, I'm a bit surprised they didn't include a CF slot on their "pro" line of laptops instead of an SD slot - especially since a CF slot could've served both CF and SD card users.
#DeleteChrome
It's $99 after the subsidies from the 2 year AT&T plan. You have to buy an iPod touch outright.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Ouch, that's a costly upgrade, when the same thing in an SD card is roughly $20.
Only a 3 megapixel camera? Decent lens? Light source for indoor? 480/320 screen? lame
Fixed that for you
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.'"
It was removed from the North American App store. In North America the Iphone is exclusive to ATT. ATT does not allow tethering. You will not be able to use the Apple tethering app in North America.
Wow! MMS! Cut and Paste! Apple is really pushing the boundaries of computing these days.
Everyone that bought an iPhone got sold down the river if the best Apple can do is release 5+ year old cell phone features as something new.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
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.
You're seriously complaining that the tech toy you bought went down in price and was replaced by a newer, better model? Have you never bought a computer before? Some might think I'm being a troll, but seriously, this is nothing new to tech products across the board - tech toy is released, sells, goes down in price and is replaced by better model, rinse and repeat until the model is phased out. Nothing new.
Can we sue you for impersonating (badly) a lawyer?
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.
Excuse me?
1) Apple spent maybe a minute bashing Windows. Since OS X is a competitor to Windows, this makes sense.
2) Snow Leopard is not a service pack. It has new features, some of which are revolutionary such as a 64-bit kernel, exchange support, OpenCL, Grand Central and dramatic performance improvements. http://www.apple.com/macosx/
3) Perhaps they took out the express slot because not enough of their customers wanted it. I have a MacBook Pro and never saw the use for it.
4) The batteries now have way more battery life, which isn't "worsening" the battery situation in my book. Perhaps you're referring to the fact that the battery is not removable? I don't see that as a major issue. How often does a MacBook Pro user replace their battery?
5) How did Apple "rip everyone off"? Apple is pricing their notebooks more aggressive *and* improving the hardware.
6) Vista was badly received and Microsoft built Windows 7 on top of it. That was their point. I can't say whether or not Vista sucks, since I haven't used it that much.
7) How is Apple "the biggest troll on the planet" for making fun of Microsoft for less than a minute? Other companies do the same things to their competitors.
8) How does less than a minute of making fun of one of their competitors "turn off the enterprise crowd"? Oh, I forgot. All of your friends must comprise 100% of the "enterprise crowd". Maybe features like Grand Central Station, OpenCL, 64-bitness and Exchange Support, not to mention remote wipe and encryption will win the enterprise crowd. After all, you don't get enterprise accounts by selling vapourware. Apple knows this.
This space left intentionally blank.
For a little bit there was a new page:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
It was pretty light on details and basically had all the same info that was on this PR page that now 404s:
http://www.apple.com/ca/press/2008_06/snow_leopard.html
Here is the original that I gleaned from ars:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/102001262931/p/9
"SAN FRANCISCO--June 9, 2008--Apple® today previewed Mac OS® X Snow Leopard, which builds on the incredible success of OS X Leopard and is the next major version of the world's most advanced operating system. Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime® X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.
"We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world's most advanced operating system."
Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named "Grand Central," making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthering OS X's lead in 64-bit technology, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone(TM), Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*
For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal® and Address Book, making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size."
Any iphone devs have any idea how the new graphics chipset might affect things? Are there going to be GS-specific graphics API calls?
Also I wonder if we'll see 3gs-only games? Obviously it would unwise to do so from a sales perspective, but I wonder if apple will even allow such a thing.
Yes, the GS has OpenGL ES 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1. So we'll probably see some GS-only games.
Really? The fact they seem to have seriously updated the Finder back end code is good. The faster mail is nice. The full Exchange support is going to be huge for many people.
It's $30. You're not forced to upgrade. You're not being asked for $400 for Business Ultimate Platinum edition.
Just because Apple isn't competing in the $200 netbook category doesn't mean they are screwing up. It means they care about the customer experience.
When did Apple ever release "me too!" products to jump into temporarily hot markets?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
The place I think Apple is still blowing it is in the "netbook" space. I will not spend over $1,000 for an Air to just do email and surf the net. In fact I just bought a Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu for that, and at $500 is much easier on the wallet. No entry here by Apple despite Apple having a Mobile ready OS, unlike bloated Windows (reason why netbooks run XP), which I just do not get. 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. The iPhone can do some basic stuff on the road, but the screen is just not big enough for "surfing" the web, and handling documents etc...
Based on my experience with the Mini 9 and Windows 7 RC compared to the same machine with Ubuntu and XP, I think it's going to take a lot to beat MS in terms of performance on a netbook any time soon.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Apple agreed to the app and it was in the appstore for a day, then pulled it without word.
Under the terms of the App Store program, they can offer or retract an App at will. They're under no obligation to provide an app, or even give a logical reason for withdrawing it. No question it's bad business to not give a reason, but there's no legal issue there.
They killed the nullriver app because AT&T told them to behind the scenes. Collusion and abuse of monopoly power.
The App Store isn't a "monopoly" in the US legal sense. If the App store was the only way to buy an app on 90% of the phones in the US, or if Apple had colluded with Google to prevent an App to be shared on either store, then there might be a conversation to be had. In the bad analogy department, you're arguing that Gillette should be sued for a monopoly because it refuses to sell Bic blades.
The App Store's licensing and content control model is basically identical to how console manufacturers control what games are permitted to be run on their consoles.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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!
Not everybody does.
It's one of the things that has kept me from buying an iPhone so far, but really, it's a nicety. It was *particularly* nice to be able to tether through an old Nokia 6820 while I was on a four month road trip across the US a few years ago, and under those particular circumstance, convenient tethering might remain enough of a compelling feature by itself to outweigh anything else.
But the funny thing is... for most of what I use tethering for *now* (quick email checks, occasional directions, priceline purchases on short trips, spur-of-the-moment amazon purchases)... I can and would pretty much use a well-designed smart phone for anyway. In other words, the phones themselves (not the least of which is the iPhone) are getting good enough that they do what most people would likely use a tethered computer for most of the time.
This isn't to say another device might not be a better fit for you... personally, I'm still weighing the merits of an iPhone vs a Pre vs an E70 for my next phone. Tethering's a factor, but not a dealbreaker, at least unless I start living a completely mobile life again.
Tweet, tweet.
I'd be pissed off to man. I started looking for my first computer when Intel released the 486/DX33. I'm STILL looking and waiting. Then came the DX/2 models, then PCI, then x4, then the Pentium. I came really close around the time of the FDIV bug. Things were looking good, the P75 and 90 were pigs, MMX did not have application support and it was going to be a while for the P2 and Cyrix had gone under. AMD screwed it up with the 686 and my wait started all over again. As soon as they stop getting faster and the price stops going down, I will eventually get a computer.
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 :)
Taking a picture of yourself with the iPhone is easy. When you can see yourself in the reflection of the Apple logo, take your picture. Works just fine and dandy.
Haven't people learned by now that this is total BS? 64-bit addressing is independent of instructions per cycle, bus width, or anything like that. (Of course, newer 64-bit systems may be happen to be faster for other, unrelated reasons.) The old "64-bit is twice as fast as 32-bit" is a line of hooey that has been sold to the public for years now (I recall it gaining prominence when Intel started promoting its Itanium plans), but I thought it was finally dying out.
If a thing is not diminished by being shared, it is not rightly owned if it is only owned & not shared. S. Augustine
Another Apple tradition gone by the wayside: Apple has long supported their older hardware better than most PC makers. (I still visit classrooms quite happily running Mac OS 8 on old PowerPC hardware, for example.) But the new Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be the first that will not run on PowerPC Macs. That makes my barely-out-of warranty PowerBook G4 end of line as far as Apple is concerned. I'm not alone in this--I don't know how many million PPC Macs are still running, but Apple was selling them new three years ago. I'm more than a little annoyed. No doubt soon I won't be able to get Apple OS security patches, updates to iLife and iTunes, etc. It's almost like running Windows XP. Fortunately, it's still Mach *nix based, and as long as FOSS developers check their code against the PPC compilers, I can still get current versions of Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
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.
Correction: In the USA, AT&T is the exclusive provider. In Canada, Rogers and Fido (same company basically) offer the iPhone, officially.
æeee!
...introduce a service pack for Leopard priced at 29USD...
It looked like a lot more than a service pack to me.
Apple charges an extremely fair price for OSX, in my opinion. Look at Vista Ultimate, which costs $250 retail for the full version, and $200 retail for the upgrade version.
Apple only charging $30 for the Snow Leopard upgrade seems like an incredible bargain to me.
Yeah, you can buy the 13.3" MacBook Pro they announced, which adds Firewire 800 and an SD card slot to the MacBook configuration they've dropped. Sadly you will have to pay an extra -$100 for this configuration.
WWRXSD?
(What Would Rufus Xavier Sarsparilla Do?)
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.
I'm smack in the middle of the Philly metro area, and apparently, AT&T isn't offering coverage enough to suit the features of this phone to me either. Or NYC metro. Or anywhere in America, for that matter, at least for a while. MMS and tethering have been around for years and years, but one won't be ready at launch, and the other was totally glanced over and for now appears delayed without mention of availability time-frame.
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.
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.
Newer DLSR's are pretty much moving in bulk to SD cards already. CF is already on the way out for pro gear.
No, this is incorrect. Low-end consumer dSLRs are certainly using SD; but those aren't pro gear. Pretty much all the new higher-end cameras from Nikon (D700, D3, D3x), Canon (EOS 5D mark II), Sony (Alpha A900), even Hasselblad (H3DII) are using CF.
The only higher-end cameras I can find that use SD are the Leica Rangefinders - and people might debate whether or not those are "pro" in the usual sense of the word (they are certainly pricey!).
#DeleteChrome
Not just requires Leopard - it runs only on Macs with Core 2 (or some Xeon) processors. That means not only no PPC love, but even the first several Intel Macs are out of luck. Like my wife's 2-year old laptop (only 1 year old or so when they finally released Java 6).
They just didn't have an announcement ready.
See the engadget article, while brief confirms its availability http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/08/atandt-well-offer-tethering-on-the-iphone/
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
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