A Bit Disappointing
Watching the MacWorld keynote transcript trickle into sites like Engadget is not only frustrating, but a little sad, and so I waited until after lunch to discover what new goodies Apple has in store for us this year.
First up was more details on the Apple TV, nee iTV. Pretty much as expected. 720p out is good. Built in hard drive: good. Otherwise, not much new to see here.
On to the big announcement: the iPhone. Of course this announcement too was expected, though the device itself exceeded my expectations. It looks as if Apple has managed to shoehorn almost all of the functionality one could think of being useful into this device and still manage to create a user interface that makes it easy to use. As I continue reading the transcript I’m thinking how much would I pay… heck I might even get this if it’s $500… well it’s $600. Yikes, ok not a stretch and then: with a 2 year contract only available at Cingular. D’oh. I’m not keen to switch from T-Mobile. Still, June is a long way off, maybe I’ll warm to the idea by then.
I continue reading the transcript waiting for the one more thing, but there isn’t one. Unless Apple dropping the “Computer” from the company name counts.
Still “Top Secret”
To be fair, I was most interested in hearing about Apple’s new phone, but a close second was finally discovering what those “Top Secret” Leopard features were that Steve referred to during the WWDC keynote. Ostensibly these were kept secret to prevent the folks in Redmond from “starting their photocopiers” any sooner than necessary. I reinterpreted that to mean, whatever we have up our sleeves isn’t stable enough to demonstrate at the moment. And either it’s still not ready, or Steve didn’t want to chance a mass loss of bladder control of the keynote attendees brought on by the announcement of too much Cupertino goodness. I would rather he took that chance. Leopard is supposed to ship in the spring and it would be really great if developers had a chance to take advantage of these features at the same time Leopard ships.
So Apple dropped Computer from its name today at MacWorld where there were no announcements regarding its computers or the future of the operating system on which they run. The organizers might also consider changing the name of the event to AppleWorld.