Today’s keynote was classic Apple. A report of the latest high-level numbers illustrated with cute Keynote animations followed by the three main acts of announcements of new laptops, Mountain Lion, and iOS 6, then a wrap up stressing what Apple thinks it does best—create products that inspire people to do great things and make a difference. Tim, Phil, Craig, and Scott were totally on their game and it showed.
Watching the streaming video, I’m struck by how well Tim and company work together to present Apple’s latest and greatest. They all enjoyed themselves on stage and brought their own personality and humor to the event. It’s clear now that while no single person could replace Steve as pitchman-in-chief, no single person had to. Not only that, they brought what they needed to bring to make for a great presentation: lots of things to talk about. Of course, we got the expected long demonstrations of features in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. But, we also got the incredible new MacBook Pro with Retina display and dual Thunderbolt ports. Sign me up for a 2.7GHz model with 16GB of RAM, please. Boom!
(Too bad I’m leaving on an overseas trip in a few days and it looks like I’ll have to wait till I get back to get my mitts on one. Ah well. I’ll just have to exercise a bit of patience, for a change. It’ll also give me a chance to debate the fairly significant cost difference between the 512GB and 768GB flash storage options… oh, and for the Retina-enabled Photoshop and other applications to ship—that’s looking on the bright side!)
The major miss I made with my silly take on the pre-event rumormongering posted last Friday was with new Mac Pros with Thunderbolt. There wasn’t a single Mac Pro mention in the keynote. Afterward, we learned that the Mac Pro line has been “upgraded” with different Xeon processors, but little else has changed. No Thunderbolt. No USB3. These are fast and powerful machines, to be sure. But without Thunderbolt, USB3, or even the latest Xeon CPUs, it’s clear why they didn’t get a mention in the keynote. My take is that these machines are targeted at a very specific and targeted niche of computation and server customers that are still buying them for one reason or another. They aren’t really for the rest of us.
To be frank, most of us—even creative “Pro” types—are fairly well served by the latest MacBook Pros and iMacs. Is there space for a higher-spec Pro-level desktop machine than the current iMac which features Thunderbolt and USB3 connectivity? Yes. Definitely. But if Apple ever fills it, it’s obvious that it won’t be with something that looks like today’s Mac Pro.
A more minor miss was the guess of an API for Siri to talk to third-party applications. I’m not too surprised that we didn’t see this yet—and to be fair maybe it’s there in NDA form, but we haven’t seen any leaks about it—but they spent a lot of time talking up how great Siri was to a developer audience. No ability to use it from a developer point of view seems a bit odd.
The last surprise for me was that Aperture was mentioned on stage. Phil called it a major upgrade. Really, it’s a middling upgrade—the details of which weren’t talked about during the keynote. In a nutshell, Aperture 3.3 features Retina support, some tweaked tools, and the ability to share a library with iPhoto. In retrospect, I guess it should be obvious that Retina displays and photography applications go together and make a natural demo example—but still. I was surprised.
As to the rest of it, I’m looking forward to Mountain Lion and iOS 6. Both of them look to be solid and useful updates from where I sit. And, while we didn’t get an AppleTV SDK during the public keynote, it wouldn’t surprised me if it comes out later. As I’ve said before, I think Apple really would have to have a long-term living room strategy totally nailed down before rolling it out.
Finally, let’s start the pool for when new iMacs with Retina displays will show up, as well as Retina Thunderbolt Displays. Because you know the current resolution ones are just going to look sucktastic after spending time working with the new MacBook Pro Retina display—just like those first two iPads look after you spend quality time with the iPad 3.
Posted by James Duncan Davidson.