Apple Events

Deskepticizing Old Skepticisms: My Look at the WWDC Announcements

By Douglas Bell ⋅ June 23, 2008 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

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If there is one thing that has been consistent about the keynotes that Steve Jobs (et al) make during the San Francisco Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), it’s that they have not really been consistent.

Take 2003, for example, when the PowerMac G5 was first introduced, topping off at 2 GHz, and Steve Jobs promised 3 GHz within a year. In 2004, Jobs had to apologize for the G5 not making it to the 3 GHz mark, but being quick to note that the percentage speed increase was higher than Intel’s. But then just a year after that, in 2005, he announced that the Mac would be shoving aside the PowerPC and adopting Intel chips.

Then, in 2006, Jobs previewed Leopard at WWDC, saying that it would be released in the Spring of 2007. But that promise also didn’t make it into the next year, when Leopard was re-previewed (reviewed?) again with an October 2007 moniker.

Now, once again, another inconsistency has taken center stage. It was in 2007 that Jobs told developers that the way that they could write apps for the iPhone was through Safari “web apps” that used HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX, repeatedly calling it a “sweet solution.” Well, the market disagreed and instead hacked together its own programs, and so here we are now in 2008, when exactly half of the keynote was dedicated to the new iPhone SDK and API and the brand new apps that the iPhone would be able to run. More on that later.

However, in my opinion, I do believe that this year’s WWDC keynote was a success (and the first one since 2005 that I actually thought was somewhat enthralling), and the main reason that I felt it was a success was that Apple took two of what I considered to be its worst-flawed products and actually made something good out of them. Let’s see what I mean.

iPhone 3G: The Reason Why You Shouldn’t Adopt Early

Those of you who have followed my comments have known that I’ve been a continuous skeptic of the iPhone from day one. Granted, I hate cell phones for numerous reasons, primarily because of their miserable interface that cannot even begin to be described by all of the negative adjectives ever coined in the English language. When I first watched Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone, I was intrigued by the new interface and the concept of multi-touch, which really seemed like the way a smartphone should be.

But the unusually strong dose of reality distortion field wore off quickly, at least for me anyway, upon learning of its flaws that made it clear that it was a first-generation product. Probably the biggest hit for me, the young teenager on a low budget who was already living life just fine without a cell phone, was the price. $499 for a cell phone? (No, I wasn’t even thinking about the 8 GB model at the time.) I’ve heard of smart phones costing a fortune when they’re unlocked, but the thought of paying $500 for a cell phone (plus tax), and then having a two-year contract with AT&T starting at a minimum of $60/month (that’s $1440 right there) was ridiculous. Oh, and I’m not really a big fan of AT&T for various reasons.

And furthermore, the iPhone had a great potential to be a powerful mobile computing device, but by closing it off to developers, the actual possibilities for what the device could actually do were quite hampered. Is it a good cell phone? Yeah, but I’m already living fine without one. Is its browsing capabilities cool? Yeah, but I’m already browsing fine on my MacBook. Does the touchable iPod look interesting? Yeah, but if I needed it I would have gotten an iPod a long time ago. That’s pretty much all it had, despite the absolutely ridiculous amount of hype surrounding it. Good luck if that could justify me spending half a grand and signing away my soul to AT&T for two years.

But that’s partially why I actually seemed intrigued by the news of the iPhone SDK and the App Store (as well as the Enterprise support to a bit of a lesser extent): Apple finally pulled its face out of the sand and realized the iPhone’s true potential: as a mobile platform. Maybe it took the craziness of the iPhone hacking ecosphere to convince Apple that the SDK was necessary, maybe it was a message in one of Scott Forstall’s dreams, who knows, but it’s clear from the demos that we saw back in March and again at WWDC that the App Store on the iPhone is something major. As David Pogue said, we’re going to see the iPhone and its multi-touch interface become the next major development platform, and the first true development platform for mobile devices, whether it be games or productivity apps. All iPhone and iPod touch users will be able to make their device do what they want or need it to do, whether it be for enterprise use or personal use, and that is major. Add in the fact that the iPhone’s price is now actually reasonable at $200, and you’ve got yourself a winner. I don’t even care if the new iPhone has 3G or GPS; to me, the App Store is the shining gem in this box of marbles and, along with the price drop, fills in the largest gap in the iPhone’s feature offering to date.

Unfortunately, there are some downsides. While the iPhone 3G may be $200 cheaper than the previous generation, the fact that it is still tied to AT&T’s 3G network, which costs $10/month more than the EDGE network did, means that with the two-year contract, you’ll be paying at least an additional $240 (yuck yuck!), and that’s presuming that you’re even in one of the few areas that benefits from having 3G speeds available. The battery is still sealed inside and you still can’t expand the memory. Despite the phone’s widescreen that’s particularly suited for widescreen movies, the storage space still maxes out at 8 or 16 GB, only enough for a handful of movies, and maybe one or two if you want to pack your music or other video on there. And we haven’t even considered the space that the new iPhone apps could take up, either. And it still isn’t available in an unlocked version, although the fact that Apple and AT&T have severed their revenue-sharing agreement means that perhaps Apple won’t come down as hard on those illicit unlocks.

And what of the iPod touch, its little brother? It barely got any showing in the keynote other than a mention that the upcoming software upgrade (enabling the App Store et al) will be half the cost of the upgrade that came last January. But the iPhone’s price has dropped dramatically, and the touch’s has not. Now an 8 GB iPod touch costs a full $100 more than the same-size iPhone, and it doesn’t have a 3G connection or GPS, or a phone or SMS for that matter. It also still costs $50 more than the iPod classic with ten times as much storage space. True, it will gain the App Store, but at the disadvantage in that it’ll only connect to the internet at a difficult-to-find-and-often-not-free Wifi hotspot, which reduces the benefit of all of this “push” magic (more below) and again makes you wonder why you don’t just stick to your laptop. There still seems to be something missing in the equation for the iPod touch, and for those of us who aren’t willing or aren’t able to sign a contract with AT&T, it might still be advisable to hold off a bit on the touch…

MobileMe: .Mac Develops an Ego

The other thing that I was glad to see was that Apple finally decided to do something about its ruptured appendage that we have all called .Mac for the past six years. .Mac may have had somewhat of a good value back in 2002, but that value was short-lived and Apple mostly forgot about it as .Mac withered into less and less.

With this rebranding of .Mac, now called MobileMe, Apple appears to have re-entered the web services market with a much stronger arm and a much smarter brain. Apple has focused on what was .Mac’s strongest elemenet–its excellent syncing abilities–and has redeveloped the whole service around it. Plus, Apple has learned quite a bit from its other projects: MobileMe is not a Mac-centric service and can now be seriously considered by PC users as well.

Of course, MobileMe still has its old .Mac (and even older iTools) roots, except that the price tag seems a bit more worth it. The e-mail and iDisk actually offer quite a bit of value with a whopping 20 GB of combined storage space. Now, that’s an iDisk that would actually be big enough to store my files for access from multiple computers (if I was still working from multiple computers like I did once upon a time). The other major features (calendar sharing, address book, web gallery) are still there as well. The only feature that I’ll really, truly miss is iCards. I guess Apple likes its Mail stationary and its iPhoto cards better, but I really think that it’s a darned shame, since it’s won many loyal fans over the past eight years.

However, with MobileMe’s new emphasis on Exchange-like “push” services, Apple is finally giving the service a meaning again. No longer just a gimmick for putting your iLife creations on the internet, MobileMe is now about helping you work smarter across multiple devices, be it Macs, PCs, or iPhones/iPod touches. Even a complete non-Mac user (which many iPod/iPhone users are) could benefit now from MobileMe and find its services quite useful. Plus, with webmail applications that feel almost completely like their Mac OS X counterparts–who knows how they got them working on IE7–it really looks like Apple has got a winner. My only gripe here is that $99/year still feels a bit steep, especially if you’re looking to combine it with the monthly plan on an iPhone, but at least the service feels worth something again and I’ll be interested to see how this takes off. Who knows, maybe even I’ll be getting a me.com e-mail address soon…

The Final Word

In our tech-enthralled world, people really get quite overhyped about brand-spanking-new things, and don’t pay as much attention to things that get refreshed and updated to be better and more complete. However, WWDC showed us that the fuller the pot is, the more delicious the soup. Though my personal position will probably prevent me from taking advantage of these new products any time in the near future (I’m still saving for a Time Capsule), Apple has finally begun to win me over to these products, and I’m sure others as well. I really think that we’re on the precipice of a new frontier for Apple and the industry, and we’d better get ready to hang on for the ride.

Tags: 3G, App Store, iPhone, keynote, Mac, MobileMe, steve jobs, WWDC