- The iPhone 3GS is as expected, only surprise is accessibility and voice commands. That's a win over all. I'll buy the 32 GB version around August. I like what I hear about light sensitivity improving even as pixel count rises -- the current device is light sensitive. The macro feature is great and, of course, the video is excellent.
- There's nothing in Snow Leopard I'm interested in. The meager improvements, like an iChat that sucks less, could be implemented in Leopard. Only the $30 price is right. Definitely a 2012 acquisition. I want the Exchange client capabilities in 10.5, not 10.6.
- The MacBook Air is still too expensive. The new MacBook is superb; tough to choose between it and an iMac now.
- I don't remember Apple ever resurrecting something they killed. They made a mistake pulling Firewire from the MacBook. Now it's back everywhere. Don't wait for the apology.
- It's striking that there was no discussion of productivity apps on the iPhone -- nothing about calendaring, tasks, contacts, etc. The Palm Pre and the iPhone are staking different areas. I'm torn. Good news for the Pre!
- Given Snow Leopard's Exchange Server client features I expect MobileMe will move to provide Exchange Server-like services (as Google has). I'm neutral on whether MM will use Google's version of Exchange server or if Apple will do there own. They won't use Microsoft's implementation.
- I don't rule out a 10.5 add-on update to iCal and Address Book for MobileMe users after MM goes to Exchange Server.
Update: Oh, and whatever happened to the resolution independent user interfaces? It's not in Leopard, and I'm not sure it's in Windows 7 either. I didn't see mention of a keyboard interface for the 3GS, last I heard the dev version didn't have API support. Also, Apple really does hate AT&T these days. Looks like a divorce might be coming. I wonder if Apple will then sign with Verizon or ... acquire Sprint ... Now wouldn't that be interesting ...
3 comments:
I think you're wrong about the importance of Snow Leopard, though it's not really important for current models -- it's more aimed at the future.
The screamingly important features SL brings are (a) Grand Central, and (b) OpenCL. Both of these are attempts to work around the fact that Moore's Law is coming to a halt, at least in terms of per-die circuit density and speed improvements on silicon. The future is clearly a multi-processor world, and the WWDC keynote bit on Grand Central clearly demonstrated that the model Apple are adopting for the future is one of many threads, running one (or a few) per cpu on multi-core systems. OpenCL offers the same sort of thing (SIMD parallelism on the GPU, if I understand it correctly) and again is aimed at offloading processor jobs onto graphics hardware.
This won't help your existing iMac or Macbook much, but when they go 8-core or 16-core, the difference it makes will be staggering.
Technically I just said there was nothing in Snow Leopard that interested me, but that 2012 looked good for an upgrade.
Really 2012 feels like tomorrow, but that's probably my 50th bd talking.
So I do think agree I'll one day appreciate Snow Leopard -- but I think that day is years away. I figure it won't work quite right until we get to late 2010 hardware.
Itlooks like you're getting your iChat upgrade. Maybe they'll have fixed your bugs.
http://www.macrumors.com/2009/06/12/new-snow-leopard-features-continue-to-emerge/
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