Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Apple keynote (and new iPhone)

New Apple Developers Conference Keynote speech. (Sadly not by the still-recovering Steve Jobs.) The main features are a new iPhone, new 13-inch and 15-inch notebooks, and the next major version of the operating system.
Phil Schiller has slimmed down. Good for him, for a while there, he just got bigger every time we saw him.

Update: an interesting development is an upcoming e-book buying and reading app for the iPhone. I prefer bigger screens, but I admit it's a very clear screen, and the interface looks just excellent (short demo about 1.20 in the keynote). I'm sure it'll be popular.
I'm doubtful though about reading magazines on the iPhone screen (they will have lots of mags and newspapers available for subscription). I don't even like many regular web pages on my iPod touch, very often the screen is simply too small for it work well.

Update: one weak feature of the first two generations of iPhones has been the camera. It was just not very good. And now they finally updated it to a new one, 3MP. I'll be interested to see how good the results are from it, it might be the thing which makes me finally get an iPhone myself, so I finally can always have a camera on me.
Judging from the keynote (about 1.48), it seems really promising. And even has video.

8 comments:

Bruce Oksol said...

According to Apple blogs, the #1 app that iPhone users wanted was "video."

This will be very interesting. And knowing Steve Jobs / Apple, I assume the video capability is very good; they are not likely to go with second-rate technology that would cheapen the iPhone experience.

Timo Lehtinen said...

Nice keynote. The iPhone has a lot going for it now.

A big disappointment is that Snow Leopard won't run on PowerPC processors.

Alex said...

Never mind the Power PC, will it still run on my 68040 based Mac?

Timo Lehtinen said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Timo Lehtinen said...

I hear you, Alex.

I recently switched to PowerPC because Jobs said it was the best architecture and something Apple was comitted for the long haul. :-)

Alex said...

recently switched to PowerPC

I first used a PowerPC (601 I believe in a 7100/66) in 1995 or there abouts.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Yeah, they stuck to it for a dozen years or so. And for the first half, it kicked as. But then it seemed IBM and Motorola dropped the ball, and got their ass kicked all over the field instead. So what can you do?
Me, I'm thankful. My G5 machine was so noisy I couldn't stand it, even with sound insulation measures. My intel tower is so quiet I can hardly hear it, and because it needs less cooling, it has more space for disks and such.

GilsDesk said...

I think Jobs is great, but I'm sorta glad he skipped the keynote this time. Apple needed to prove that they can handle these sorts of public festivals without Jobs driving the bus. I think they did a good job of that, and now the financial world doesn't need to have a seizure and dump Apple stock every time Steve has a health issue (or rumored health issue).