My busy life makes it difficult to write for this blog when I’d like to, but I figure, better late than never for a post-WWDC review of my previous thoughts.
iPhone: The hardware and coming upgrade look fantastic, and I feel confident many very good third-party applications are going to become available quickly. However, the phone is still tied to AT&T (no surprise) and the voice/data plans are still grossly overpriced. If it wasn’t for the discount I’ll be getting, I’d be on the fence about this phone. Great hardware, great software, but the service plan to make it all work is a flat-out rip-off. The question would be, what do I feel I’m getting out of the phone versus how badly to I feel I’m being ripped off?
.Mac revision/rebranding: I rolled my eyes when the rumors of the “Mobile Me” rebranding of .Mac came true. The name plays to the unimaginative narcissism started by MySpace, named and populated by idiots. The new logo looks like something from a Hello Kitty lunch box, punctuated by the old “me” from Windows Me, just to add insult to injury.
As much as I may dislike the name and branding, the most superficial aspects of the service, I’m very excited to use the new applications it provides in conjunction with my Mac and (future) iPhone. The demos so far look fantastic (Don’t they always?), but it would be inappropriate to say anything beyond that since they’re unavailable for use at the present time to those of us outside the Apple campus. As presented, and if Apple follows through with their marketing, Mobile Me will be much closer to what I’ve thought .Mac should have been for quite a while now.
Also related, I’m interested to see what gets produced from a combination of SquirrelFish (as dumb as it is, a better name than Mobile Me), SproutCore (also a better name than Mobile Me), and Snow Leopard or Windows. Could, for instance, the Mail application in Snow Leopard be the Mobile Me mail application, except stored locally and not pulled from the Mobile Me servers? That would give Apple a single code base to maintain for the app and a single feature set and interface for users at their personal computers and away from them. I’m no developer, and I may be misunderstanding SproutCore, but I’m interested to see what applications, if any, are identical between desktop and browser and different operating systems. Do any real developers have something to add to this?
10.6 Snow Leopard: I was disappointed that Steve blew past Snow Leopard, and that details were given during a WWDC session that’s under NDA. However, what Apple has said publicly doesn’t necessarily disprove my previous hypothesis of two feature-parallel OS X versions existing side-by-side, one that’s universal, one that’s Intel only, for some length of time. Some of the announced guts of Snow Leopard, such as the extent of 64-bit support, OpenCL, and Grand Central, may offer advantages to Intel machines, but they don’t necessarily provide any user-accessible features in the OS that current Leopard is missing. Features that are presumably not Intel dependent, like native Exchange support and a re-written Quicktime, can be provided as upgrades to current Leopard users. Those users won’t necessarily get the optimizations Snow Leopard users would get, but the functionality would be the same.
Of course, I have no idea if this will really happen. 10.5 may never see native Exchange support. OpenCL may enable end-user features I’m not aware of. Re-written Quicktime may not be backportable to 10.5. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else outside the Apple campus, hence, I haven’t been demonstrably disproved. My hypothesis remains valid because it hasn’t been specifically invalidated. To me, it would make sense to keep two feature parallel versions of OS X alive at the same time. To Apple, it may not. It’s difficult for me to say with my complete lack of facts.
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June 17th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
This iPhone at this price point is enough to make my wife & I dump our Treos and take the plunge. I won’t recount the full list of reasons which I’ve already blogged about extensively (/shameless plug). Suffice it to say that we’ve had enough of technology that almost works.
I’m interested in the upgrades to Mobile Me. My wife & I share a .Mac account. She has an email only account and we share our calendars and contacts via a full account. I’ll be interested to see how the upgrades work in action. The idea of getting changes to calendars and contacts pushed to both our phones immediately is one I’m very interested in.
As far as Snow Leopard goes, I don’t know what the fsck is going on. I’ll be interested in hearing more. But for once, amazingly, I think I’m all theoried out on the OS. I’m just going to wait for Apple to make a real announcement.
Though if I read one more article taking as gospel the idea that Snow Leopard is Intel-only based on a single website’s supposed screen shot from someone violating an NDA I think I’ll have to break something. Even if it’s true, that only means that the first developer preview is Intel-only. Firstly, Apple wants its developers to be using Intel only. Secondly, for all we know there’s PPC compatibility in a nascent form which might appear in a later build. I’m guessing Snow Leopard probably really is Intel-only. I’m not, however, ready to take it as read.
This is why I love MacWorld. They don’t take speculation and call it news. Thank you for being one of the few to understand that this is all still supposition.