14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has kicked off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference today, with a keynote address delivered by the company’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller. As expected, Apple pulled off some great stuff recently, and shared it all with WWDC attendees.
As usual, the company cited an increased number of adopters, lately thanks to the iPhone. No surprise there. However, Schiller showed a graph of Mac OS X adopters, not iPhone OS fans. OS X adoption tripled after the iPhone was released, Schiller stressed. But Apple’s SVP of Product Marketing didn’t waste time, and delved right into the announcements.
New MacBooks
A “brand new” version of the MacBook Pro is now available, with a new Lithium polymer battery. The battery is built-in (non repleacable by the user), it offers up o 7 hours of work time, and lasts for five years (1000 charges). The 15-inch Pro’s screen has 60% more color gamut. As far as ports are concerned, the notebook adds an SD card slot. Performance also got a boost: 3.06 GHz Dual Core 6MB Level 2 Cache, up to 8GB of RAM and 500GB hard drive / 256GB SSD. The notebook’s size and weight is the same. The price? $1699!
The 17-inch Pro is now priced at $2499 and has an ExpressCard slot.
The 13-inch unibody MacBook also gains the built-in battery, as well as the new display and SD card slot. Up to 8GB of memory, 500GB HDD / 256GB SSD, built-in backlit keyboard, FireWire 800 are the rest of the specs. For $1199, the 13-inch unibody MacBook is really just a smaller MacBook Pro now. In fact, Apple chose to rename the laptop, and include it with the Pro-line of Apple notebooks. So, the former 13-inch unibody MacBook is now the "13-inch MacBook Pro."
Snow Leopard
Bertrand Serlet, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering took the stage to discuss the latest version of Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. According to Serlet, Apple is refining more than 90% of Leopard in Snow Leopard. Highlights include:
- rewritten (but not visually altered) Finder - 3D rendering for the Dock - built-in expose for the Dock - 45% faster installation for apps - file system compression saves 6GB from the Leopard install - opening a JPEG image is now 2x faster - better selection of text from PDFs - new Chinese Input Method via Multi-Touch trackpads (available for MacBook users) - Safari 4: shipping for Leopard, Tiger and Windows. Safari 4 is allegedly 7.8x faster than IE8 and has passed 100/100 of the Acid 3 test, according to Serlet; uses Crash resistance (new feature); 64-bit JavaScript performance up by 50%. - QuickTime X: Modern foundation, Hardware acceleration, ColorSync and HTTP streaming, and a sleek new UI; Quicktime X is a completely revamped version of the media player: playback controls go right on the video; the software also gains video editing features
For the “little touches” inside Snow Leopard, Serlet invited Craig Federighi (Chief Technology Officer, Ariba, Inc). up on stage.
- a new magnifier for zooming in on thumbnails within the Finder. - the ability to play movies and scroll through PDFs directly from the icon - Dock Expose manages windows for a de-cluttering of the user’s view - Cover Flow through all your browsing history. - Spotlight-search text in the pages in your browser’s history
As for the new technologies Snow Leopard employs, Serlet came back on stage to make a few more observations:
64-bit - with 32-bit being limited to 4GB of usable RAM, Snow Leopard can make use of more memory as it runs all major OS X apps in 64-bit.
Multi-threaded programming - Grand Central Dispatch offers support for multi-core throughout the entire OS (Snow Leopard)
Graphics - OpenCL takes GPU power and redirects it for general-purpose computing
Built-in Exchange support for Mail, iCal and Address Book
Supporting all Intel Macs (including the older ones), Snow Leopard is priced at just $29, because Apple wants everyone to upgrade. A family pack will also be available for for $49 in September, when the new OS makes its debut.
iPhone OS 3.0
As usual, Scott Forstall, Senior Vice President of iPhone Software came up on stage to show off the new stuff inside iPhone OS 3.0. Forstall generally invites developers on stage to tell their iPhone-story and present their apps. This time there was a considerably higher number of devs “prepared” by Apple to showcase the capabilities of iPhone OS 3.0.
Forstall began by revealing that the iPhone SDK was downloaded over a million times. Also, there are now over 50,000 apps in the App Store. Best of all, more than 40,000,000 iPhones and iPod touch units have been sold so far, according to Apple’s SVP of iPhone Software.
iPhone OS 3.0 is touted as “a major update to the iPhone operating system. It brings with it more than 100 new features,” Apple’s guy said. According to Forstall, those include:
- cut, copy and paste (works across apps) - undo support - developer APIs - Cocoa Touch support for text - landscape keyboard for email, notes, and messages - MMS later this summer (AT&T) - search calendars, music, notes and email - spotlight allows you to search across your phone, including apps - the ability to purchase or rent movies directly from the iPhone via iTunes, as well as TV shows, music videos and audio books, over 3G - support for iTunes U - enhanced parental controls - tethering: share your iPhone internet connection with a computer (Mac or PC), via USB and even Bluetooth - HTML 5 support - JavaScript is 3 times faster - auto-fill (forms) - support for more than 30 languages - Find My iPhone - available only to MobileMe customers - 1000 new APIs - Peer to Peer support - support for third party accessories - Push Notification
Just like before, iPhone OS 3.0 will be free for all iPhone owners, and $9.95 for iPod touch users. The software will be available worldwide on June 17th.
iPhone 3G S
As soon as these announcements were made, Phil Schiller was back to make drop the bomb: a new iPhone dubbed “3G S”.
According to Apple’s SVP of Product Marketing, iPhone 3G S is capable of launching messages 2.1x faster, loading SimCity 2.4x faster, viewing Excel 3.6x faster, and loading NY Times 2.9x faster. It boasts a 3MP autofocus camera, and video recording with built-in editing options. Another new feature is Voice Control. Besides voice dialing, users will be able to use this feature to ask their iPhone what song is playing and get a response, or tell it to “play more songs like this.” Other features were mentioned as follows:
- built-in digital compass - enables orientation - built-in VoiceOver - built-in support for Nike+ gear - Hardware Encryption (instantaneous data wipe) - improved battery life
iPhone 3G S is priced at $199 for the 16GB model, and $299 for 32 GB (with AT&T). It sports the same design and comes in a White or Black glossy case. The device will be available come June 19, but only in a limited number of territories for starters. The phone will ultimately be purchasable in 80 countries around the globe.
Good news for those who’ve been planning to get the iPhone 3G. The current version stays and is now available for $99 under the same (AT&T) terms. This is happening today.
Apple didn’t do its usual, “one more thing” routine, but did entice WWDC attendees to join them at Hotel Utah later on today.
