Everyone else in Mac blog-land has been doing this for a while now. I know I\u2019m behind but I was traveling for work the week of WWDC and blogging had to wait.<\/p>\n
So, my reactions, in no particular order:<\/p>\n
\u2022 I was really hoping for a refresh on the MacBook Pro<\/strong> line, and so I was thrilled with the this part. I ordered a new 15\u201c MacBook Pro that night. I\u2019ll be handing down my 2007 (that\u2019s pre-unibody) 15\u201d 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\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0iPhone 3G S<\/strong>. I don\u2019t know, I guess it\u2019s good. I have an iPhone 3G and the changes would be nice, but aren\u2019t compelling enough to get me to shell out the outrageous dollars AT&T wants for an upgrade. Magnetometer? Meh, don\u2019t care. Better camera? OK, but not a huge deal. Video? The phone I had pre-iPhone had video, and I don\u2019t think I ever used it, not once. Wake me when it\u2019s 720p, until then, meh. Faster CPU and more RAM? Well, OK, that\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019d do it in a heartbeat. (Certainly, next year when Apple does the next iteration of this and I\u2019ll have met the two-year contract, I\u2019ll be more interested,)<\/p>\n \u2022 $99 iPhone<\/strong>. I think this has gotten short shrift in the press and blog world (I hate the term \u201cblogosphere\u201d) 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\u2019m 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 \u201cwell, crap, for that price, why not get one?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 iPhone 3.0<\/strong>. Look, 3.0 will be a significant step forward, but we already knew that. The biggest deal is that it\u2019s coming out soon, which is good. The \u201cfind my iPhone\u201d thing is a nice bonus, to be sure, and that I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t give a crap about since I can just send pictures in email, which is perfectly fine. However, I\u2019d love tethering. Yes, I get that AT&T\u2019s 3G network is already being maxed out in places, primarily by the armies of iPhones already on the market. What I\u2019m really worried about is that AT&T will have only one price plan for this, and that it\u2019ll be some enormous monthly charge for unlimited tethering. I don\u2019t intend to use it much so I don\u2019t want to shell out for an unlimited plan. I\u2019d really like a plan that let\u2019s me pay like $10 for a one-day window of unlimited use, which I\u2019d only hit every once in a while. I am not, however, optimistic about this. <\/p>\n The other thing I\u2019d 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<\/a>. 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<\/em> 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.)<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0Snow Leopard<\/strong>. Nice price point, that\u2019s for sure. Clearly, Apple really<\/em> wants everyone to upgrade. I\u2019m glad it\u2019s not too soon, too, as Leopard is itself very good and I worry about Snow Leopard breaking stuff, and I\u2019m in no hurry for that. Hopefully it won\u2019t break too much but you never know. One thing I\u2019m still not sure about: will Rosetta still run under Snow Leopard? This is hugely important to me and if the answer is \u201cno,\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s strong point. There\u2019s something to be said for doing a better job of looking forward because they aren\u2019t as concerned with looking back, but still, I\u2019d like to at least occasionally be able to run something that\u2019s really only a few years old. <\/p>\n OK, what\u2019d I miss?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Everyone else in Mac blog-land has been doing this for a while now. I know I\u2019m behind but I was traveling for work the week of WWDC and blogging had to wait. So, my reactions, in no particular order: \u2022 I was really hoping for a refresh on the MacBook Pro line, and so I … Continue reading WWDC 2009 Reactions<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[17],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283\/revisions\/284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/byrneweb.com\/sunburn\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}