Everyone else in Mac blog-land has been doing this for a while now. I know I’m behind but I was traveling for work the week of WWDC and blogging had to wait.
So, my reactions, in no particular order:
• I was really hoping for a refresh on the MacBook Pro line, and so I was thrilled with the this part. I ordered a new 15“ MacBook Pro that night. I’ll be handing down my 2007 (that’s pre-unibody) 15” MacBook pro to one of my grad students. I plan to give up the Mac Pro in my office to my lab since some of the new research we’re taking on will require a little more horsepower, and I plan to make the MacBook Pro my primary at-the-office machine as well as my traveling machine. I think the new top-end MBPs will actually have enough horsepower and storage to make this practical.
• iPhone 3G S. I don’t know, I guess it’s good. I have an iPhone 3G and the changes would be nice, but aren’t compelling enough to get me to shell out the outrageous dollars AT&T wants for an upgrade. Magnetometer? Meh, don’t care. Better camera? OK, but not a huge deal. Video? The phone I had pre-iPhone had video, and I don’t think I ever used it, not once. Wake me when it’s 720p, until then, meh. Faster CPU and more RAM? Well, OK, that’d be really nice. But that alone does not even come close to justifying the upgrade expense. Voice control. Well, first, this should have been on the initial iPhone. It’s a good thing to have, but again, not a huge deal. The whole package together is almost enough to get me to think about it, but still too damn pricey. For $200 I’d do it in a heartbeat. (Certainly, next year when Apple does the next iteration of this and I’ll have met the two-year contract, I’ll be more interested,)
• $99 iPhone. I think this has gotten short shrift in the press and blog world (I hate the term “blogosphere”) because I think this is a huge deal. For a mere hundred bucks, people will be able to buy an excellent mobile computing experience, particularly given the 3.0 OS. I think this will do a lot more to grow market share than the 3G S. I’m already pretty amazed at how common iPhones are, and I suspect this will draw in a lot of people, as price is one of the three main things keeping people from going iPhone. (The other two are not being willing to give up a physical keyboard and being locked in to AT&T, both of which have legitimacy. AT&T sure seems to be working hard to keep the latter group away.) I think $100 is the “well, crap, for that price, why not get one?” price point. I suspect not just entirely new customers, but that a lot of spouses and children of current iPhone owners are about to join the club, too.
• iPhone 3.0. Look, 3.0 will be a significant step forward, but we already knew that. The biggest deal is that it’s coming out soon, which is good. The “find my iPhone” thing is a nice bonus, to be sure, and that I didn’t see coming. Mostly what the 3.0 OS does, though, is [a] provide things that should have been fixed a while ago (cut & paste), and [b] make AT&T look bad. MMS I don’t give a crap about since I can just send pictures in email, which is perfectly fine. However, I’d love tethering. Yes, I get that AT&T’s 3G network is already being maxed out in places, primarily by the armies of iPhones already on the market. What I’m really worried about is that AT&T will have only one price plan for this, and that it’ll be some enormous monthly charge for unlimited tethering. I don’t intend to use it much so I don’t want to shell out for an unlimited plan. I’d really like a plan that let’s me pay like $10 for a one-day window of unlimited use, which I’d only hit every once in a while. I am not, however, optimistic about this.
The other thing I’d really like to see come along with 3.0 is someone developing an app that allows the iPhone to take an external keyboard such as the Bluetooth-based Logitech diNovo Mini. I would pay $10 for that ability in a heartbeat. Any iPhone app developers listening? Please? (One wonders if netbook vendors would pay to keep such a thing off the market. If I were Dell and MSI, the apparently leading vendors of netbooks hacked into running OS X, I would pay significant dollars to buy out developers about to release such software.)
• Snow Leopard. Nice price point, that’s for sure. Clearly, Apple really wants everyone to upgrade. I’m glad it’s not too soon, too, as Leopard is itself very good and I worry about Snow Leopard breaking stuff, and I’m in no hurry for that. Hopefully it won’t break too much but you never know. One thing I’m still not sure about: will Rosetta still run under Snow Leopard? This is hugely important to me and if the answer is “no,” then it will be a long time before I upgrade. I know Apple is still trying to wean everyone off the PowerPC but dammit, I only just got a Lisp environment (niche enough for you?) that doesn’t suck that runs on Leopard in Rosetta, and if Snow Leopard breaks it, well, then 10.6 will just have to wait. Windows, with all its faults, does one thing incredibly well: backward compatibility. Not exactly Apple’s strong point. There’s something to be said for doing a better job of looking forward because they aren’t as concerned with looking back, but still, I’d like to at least occasionally be able to run something that’s really only a few years old.
OK, what’d I miss?