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Macworld ‘07 reflections
Posted January 13th, 2007, in Apple, Apple Devices, OS X.
“Opinion of the event largely hinges on the iPhone and if it’s released. I expect reaction to be positive from people who enjoy shiny Apple gadgets, and negative from Mac developers who wanted more from Leopard.”
Hey, how good am I?
Alright, I was surprised that there were no Mac announcements at all. But overall, I really enjoyed this keynote and think the iPhone carried things along just fine. It was a lot better than I had expected in terms of being an innovative gadget with a really great interface.
Well, maybe we did get a small Mac announcement. There was a revamped Airport Extreme, which is no longer beautiful, keeps the stupid name, but happily adds future-proof 802.11n support and lets you use the USB port for sharing hard drives. How cool is that? I’ll use it for Time Machine later. Too bad about the $180 price, though.
Anyway, on to the important stuff.
Apple TV
Guess I was wrong on the iTV.. I mean Apple TV, I mean  TV. It doesn’t have a new feature as I speculated, just a boring old extended version of Front Row. Oh, I suppose it has a hard drive, and is sadly limited to 720p.
This is going to be a failed product. It already seems like Apple are sweeping it under the rug. If it attracts speculation from the press as some sort of huge solution competing with Xbox 360, Tivo, Vista MCE, etc, it will be perceived as a bomb.
I reiterate - who wants a dumb box that plays movies, music and photos and costs a whole $299? Better to get a PS3 or Xbox 360, which do similar things but play games and in the case of PS3 is a Blu ray player. It’s way overpriced, boring and will have limited appeal to everybody.
iPhone
Wow! I was really impressed. It’s a heck of a phone and I think it really deserves the billing Apple is giving it. While we’re now seeing bits and pieces of information that might make its individual technical features seem less revolutionary, you could also find similar products to the iPod during its introduction and it was only through the tweaked features and cumulative effect of useful features and a brilliant software implementation that it was able to become a “revolutionary” product.
Is it too expensive? Yes. But I think Apple will meet their target of 10m phones in 2007, and they probably want to set it up as a high end product so the lustre won’t wear off by 2008 when they can sell it in volume. I keep thinking “RAZR” - expensive at first, but wow so cool, then steadily reduced price and diversification as it becomes more and more popular. Apple won’t let the cool fade away, though, for sure, as Motorola so often do.
Apple’s so buddy-buddy with Cingular right now, I’m not sure what to think of the odds of my idea where it uses a VOIP service and WiFi to provide free paid-by-Apple calls to anyone anywhere. However, the fact Apple did include WiFi as well as mentioning a feature where it automatically switches between EDGE and WiFi give me hope. It seems all that remains for the iPhone to become this hugely disruptive device is for the following pieces of software to be released:
- An app (it’d be nicer if it was integrated into the main interface by Apple) that will use a VOIP network like Skype or Gizmo to call people if an open WiFi access point is available. Super cheap calls! I think Apple might eventually do this, but a shorter-term scenario is that Skype ports their app to iPhone. Imagine paying their $25\year plan for free calls all over your country? As long as you have wireless at home, you could disconnect your landline, too. How cool.
- “Send this file to another iPhone\PC\phone”. It has Bluetooth, it has WiFi, it doesn’t have DRM’ed music (presumably).. some hacker can do this, even if Apple don’t like it!
- IM support! And.. video chat support! Even if it was view-only, that’d be cool. I think IM support will be added around or before the launch, but video chat won’t eventuate until next year when iPhone 2.0 has that invisible camera behind the LCD as foretold in an Apple patent.
- Games. It’s a lot more exciting as a game platform than any other device I’ve seen that’s not from Nintendo or SCEE.
Oh, yeah, it’s not open to third parties yet. I think this is kinda dumb, but will change with time. It’s kinda too early to tell - the main menu indicates stuff can be added, and I’ve no doubt Apple will want to make Widgets available.. if Widgets have the same native cocoa support Mac OS X ones do, then I expect people to make stuff feel almost perfectly native inside them. But hopefully Apple will realise over time that an open software market will only help them, even if there will be some crapware to dilute the pool.
Leopard, iLife\iWork and Macs
Okay, so I have a theory now. iLife, iWork and Leopard will be demoed in a superduper all-in-one event that occurs in the next few months.. maybe April, maybe even WWDC (what are they gonna talk about at WWDC if not Leopard?) This is when we’ll see the predictions I made earlier. I think that Front Row will be updated to look like the Apple TV, furthering its uselessness, but the “top secret” changes will be modest and unimpressive. The thing to look forward to should be a brand new Mac case design or two - I think the iMac and MacBook Pro are hurting the most.
I kinda hope the iMac is updated in the next few weeks, though. Powerbooks were, in January 2005. I might end up waiting a while.
All up? Great keynote. I enjoyed it. I think I’ll buy an iPhone as soon as it’s possible to get one unlocked.
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