Apple’s WWDC: The Most Important Bits
So WWDC is underway. Hit the clicky thingie to read all the stuff you need to know…
New 15″ Macbook Pro
- Lithium-Polymer Batter, but it’s non-removable (yuck)
- Up to 7 hours of battery life (we’ll have to see how realistic that is)
- Has an SD card slot (hey, try sticking one of those in an iPhone already!)
- Up to 8GB memory (at double the normal cost, prolly)
- Up to 3.06 GHz dual-core processor (I have nothing witty to say about that)
- 500GB HD or 250GB SSD (again, at what cost?)
- Starts at $1,699 for the base configuration
New 17″ Macbook Pro
- ExpressCard slot
- Starts at $2,499 for the base configuration
13″ Aluminum Mac is also a Macbook pro
- Starts at $1,199 for the base configuration
- These three models are available today
Macbook Air
- Now starts at $1,499 for the base configuration, or $1,799 for the Air with a 250GB SSD ($700 less than before)
Snow Leopard
- Installs up to 45% faster than Leopard
- Uses 6GB less disk space than Leopard
- 64-bit JavaScript performance is 50% faster
- QuickTime and QuickTime UI improved / updated
- Priced at just $29 if you already have Leopard, or $49 for a family pack (Microsoft should take a cue from this when pricing Windows 7!)
- Available in September
iPhone OS 3.0
- Cut, Copy, Paste works OS-wide, with Undo (finally!)
- MMS messaging – but not until later this summer, when AT&T “will be ready” (finally! wait…what?!)
- Landscape mode now works in e-mail, notes & messages (finally!)
- Spotlight will let you search your whole iPhone (nifty)
- You’ll be able to rent and purchase movies from your iPhone now (rather than having to go through iTunes on your computer)
- Tethering now officially official (finally!)
- Support for HTTP streaming of audio and video (with quality adjuted to suit bitrate available)
- Autofill will allow you to save usernames / passwords (with iPhone’s security being what it is, this is probably a bad idea…I’m just sayin’)
- Find My iPhone available to MobileMe users, to track their phone if they lose it (oh boy…)
- Custom Push Notifications now available (can’t wait for EVERY dev to take advantage of this and drain the iPhone’s battery in about 11 seconds)
- Companion apps can talk over dock connector now (does this mean stuff like eWallet will FINALLY be able to auto-sync when you connect your iPhone?!)
- Peer-to-Peer networking now…phones in close proximity can do stuff together (couldn’t they do this before?)
- Hardware vendors can create true companion software and hardware now
- TomTom bringing turn-by-turn navigation (through App Store) and companion hardware…optional TomTom Car Kit (iPhone windshield suction dealie and maybe a custom power cable?)
- Some crazy woman showed off a game called Star Defense, the point of which is to show that you can get game content and updates through the game now. Available today for $5.99.
- Well, Apple just outed themselves that the on-stage demos are all fake…some balloon demo failed on-stage, but the graph on-screen updated anyway. Oops. The point of the balloon demo was supposed to be that you can now connect sensors to an iPhone and use it for just about any kind of science-related work. Or to let it be the brain behind your coolest Mindstorms projects (that’s my comment, not theirs)
- (Apple’s wasting a lot of WWDC keynote time showing off new apps…time that could be better spent unveiling a new iPhone…plus, with over 50,000 apps in the app store, do we really need to know about these 5 or 6? I’ll give you a hint…no!)
- zipcar is showing off their app with which you can reserve cars and even unlock them and honk the horn using your iPhone. I guarantee somebody will hack this and steal a bunch of zipcars…again, iPhone not famous for awesome security.
- Another demo just failed on-stage, this one something that controls guitar amps or something like that. Again, I don’t really care about this. Why isn’t WWCD’s keynote all about what I want?!
- iPhone OS 3.0 free for iPhone users, $9.95 for iPod Touch users, available on June 17th
iPhone 3GS
- Fastest iPhone so far (duh)
- Claimed performance times for loading / running / rendering are 2x to 4x faster than on iPhone 3G
- Supports OpenGL | ES
- Supports 7.2 Mbps HSDPA (does AT&T offer this? hmm…)
- New 3MP camera with autofocus & autoexposure
- New camera supports manual focus and exposure
- Low light sensitivity is improved
- New camera has Macro mode (10cm)
- Video recording (finally!) at 30fps, VGA resolution (640×480)
- Basic video trimming can be done on-phone
- Videos can be shared via MMS, e-mail, YouTube or MobileMe
- Voice control – hold down the Home button until you see the waveform, then start talking
- You can voice dial, control the iPod with your voice (tell it to play songs by a particular artist, or play a particular playlist)
- iPhone 3GS includes a compass (magnetometer)
- New compass app
- When using Google Maps on iPhone 3GS, maps will orient to your orientation (just like on a GPS system)
- Hardware encryption, instantaneous remote wipe (uh oh!) and encrypted iTunes backups
- Claimed battery life times are 9 hours of WiFi, 10 hours video playback, 30 hours audio playback, 12 hours 2G talk time, 5 hours 3G talk time (same as iPhone 3G, and also a lie)
- 16GB for $199, 32GB for $299, white or black (these prices are through AT&T w/contract of course)
- iPhone 3G stays on the market for $99 (for the 8GB version) as of today
- iPhone 3GS available June 19th (faster announcement-to-available time than last year!)
So, there doesn’t appear to be a front-facing video camera on the iPhone 3GS, which is a total drag…this is the second year now that this was rumored and not delivered. Bummer. And what about the “tablet” that was rumored? Oh well. And as with last year, there’s no “Oh…one more thing…”
June 8th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
All excellent information. I’d love a 3GS if i hadn’t just bought a 3G 5 months ago. Thrilled about Snow Leopard as well.
June 8th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
well I love Verizon and I was waiting for it to be released for it but it looks like I will be going Blackberry by the end of the year(that’s when my contract is up) so I will be your Blackberry/pause.com corespondent. To bad I really wanted an iphone…
June 9th, 2009 at 11:08 am
It’s funny, because i’m going back and listening to some of ya’lls older podcasts and you just trash Apple and the iPhone for all the stuff that it’ll now be doing in the 3.0 release. Ironically, i work for AT&T as well. No insults taken, but you guys have me giggling over your comments.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Heh heh well no offense intended of course…I’m sure you didn’t decide on a lot of the stuff we’ve trash-talked.
I’m still extremely disappointed that there was no official word on being able to sync Outlook data with multiple computers, but I’m hoping that just shows up with the OS 3.0 software.
That aside, yeah, a lot of what we (and loads of other people) have complained about with the iPhone have now been addressed.
The one thing that I was very excited about yesterday was the apparent ability for 3rd party devs to now take advantage of the dock connection.
But back to AT&T, here in the Chicago area, the service is dreadful. And I still think the pricing model for the iPhone is a ripoff. It’s just SO expensive. If it worked well the majority of the time, and if the data speed was on par with a basic DSL landline connection, it’d totally be worth it. But even 3G is painfully slow most of the time, and I cannot go a single day without dropping at least one call 🙁
So, whatever you do there, poke somebody in the head for us and see if they can just fix these issues, would ya? 😉
June 9th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
What i’ve seen about wireless is that you aren’t alone. There seems to be a lot of complaints over the chicago area. Most of it is on bulletin boards and corporate information. I do know that Ameritech (ya’lls wireline entity) was having serious issues all the way around when Ma Bell acquired them, not just with calls, but hardware and even within the corporation itself. Kind of a lazy attitude. I’ve always been on the mobility side back when we were SBC to Cingular and now ATT, but i can say that it’s loads better than landline. Things just work slower and dumber on the landline side. 😛
We’ve got a corporate intranet site that we can have your numbers checked, but there wouldn’t be any easy way to do that since we don’t really know each other and i don’t forsee you just openly handing over your vital stats. My suggestion is to continue talking with customer service until it gets fixed. It’s maddening, i know, but otherwise it won’t get any better.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Yeah, when AT&T was broken up originally, the local telco here became Illinois Bell. Then later it became Ameritech. Then after that it was SBC, and now AT&T again.
However, my understanding is that Cingular and AT&T (land) had no affiliation until AT&T and Cingular merged.
Actually, I’m a bit confused about the whole relationship between AT&T (land) and AT&T (mobility). I have a friend who used to work for Cellular One before it was Cingular, and he had to move to GA because, at least at the time, there was some regulation about the local telco not being able to operate cell service as well, so he had to follow the work out of state after some merger or other.
Here, AT&T (land) is actually very, very good, with excellent customer service. AT&T (mobile) on the other hand, has a lot of issues.
There was a funny incident last summer after the iPhone 3G was released: At Lollapalooza in Chicago, nobody could get reception on their iPhones. AT&T was the concert’s big sponsor. Heh.