Apple WWDC: iOS 5, Lion, iCloud

Steve Jobs was on hand today to kick off Apple's WWDC keynote. Lion took the lead, with no surprises except a $29.99 pricetag and a July ship date. iOS is getting a new "Notification Center"; Twitter is being integrated; he announced a split thumbable keyboard for iPads; wireless syncing; and a native IM system for iOS devices, shipping in the Fall. iCloud will be free, syncing apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts and iWork apps) across devices. Photostream is iCloud for pictures. iTunes iCloud will let you re-download your tracks at last, and iTunes Match will let you match your ripped CDs to Apple's copies.

Few surprises

[fermion]

$30 for the OS is the same price as the current OS. The only difference is there is no family pack. This is because device on an Apple account is considered the same device for licensing purposes. If you have 10 macs on you account, then all 10 macs can get the Appstore Software. This is a really attractive feature of Apple software, and I am glad that all Appstore software is going to follow this model. One of my biggest issues with MS is having to buy MS WIndows at $200 a pop for every machine I own.

We also expected the over the network OS upgrades, something I think will really separate Mac Os and iOS hardware form the MS crowd. Lack of installation media is a concern for some, but I put all my OS on HD partitions and install from the harddisk anyway. Haven't install from a DVD in years. Haven't bought a application DVD in years.

The dig about it just working is really apropos. I tried to use Amazon music service thingy. Bought the music, put it on the web, could not download it to my computer afterwards. So I set up Amazon to download to my computer, thinking I would upload back to Amazon. Bought the lady gaga for $1, never got it to download properly, Amazon will not aswer my requests to download it again. I think this is called theft. Really wondering if I am going to do business with them when they won't give me my purchases.

One thing I am concerned about is the transition from Mobileme to iCloud. They are not making it cheaper, 5gb for $20 is not better than the current deal. They are just giving away inexpensive services for free, just like they did with itools. Most people are not going to upload that many pictures in 30 days, and well over a decade of mail is not taking more than a few gb of space.

The versioning on iOS is going be a huge thing, since the iOS 'filesystem' is not versionable with any current tools. OTOH, semms iworks is stil imcompatable between Mac OS and iOS so I would have liked to see some work done on that front.

Apple is competing hard against Google and RIM, which is good, but they seem to have lost their way on some of the applications. This happened in the late 80's when they were trying to cut prices to compete with the PC. The software was spun off the claris and a lot of good applications were lost.

Re:In other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing new to see here. Apple is the king of second-mover advantage, allowing others to innovate and stumble over all the usability issues in new technologies, only to swoop in when the time is right to simplify and unify them.

Re:In other words...

[BitZtream]

The real difference will be exactly what you pointed out.

Windows has had them since Vista ... no one makes their apps handle the notifications.

Mac Apps (high profile ones anyway) will, like all the ones Apple makes.

Kinda makes you wonder why Apple seems to be able to get their internal apps to use all the OS features yet Windows developers don't. iOS developers are pretty lazy (on average) at this point just because there are so many of them, its kinda like Visual Basic over there at the moment, but not so much for OSX app yet. I expect the major league apps will all support the features in their next major release, with the exception of Adobe products which pretty much seem to try to teach Microsoft just how long you can milk an old, shitty code base without adding any new features and just changing the gui while forcing upgrades via incompatible default save formats.

I expect that iWorks and iLife will be updated right around the same time as OSX 10.7 is released, why doesn't Office 2007 support these features yet? Okay, they didn't want to update it cause they wanted people to buy the new version ... then why doesn't 2010 have it?

I do Windows development on most days, I actually hadn't even heard about these features until fairly recently ... long after I learned about it for OSX ... which I do write for occasionally, but not as a primary job function.

I hate to say it, but Apple does seem to use some sort of magic, Windows has been 'better' in most ways almost always compared to OSX (I'm ignoring Vista in the same way I'm ignoring Copland), yet I'd still rather use OSX any day, even when it holds me back ... could be the UNIX under it that does it, but it just seems like everything feels better in OSX, technically inferior (debatable) or not.