Ah, spring. Birds, leaves on trees, outdoor events, maybe some good beer. And thousands of rabid apple fanboys converging on San Francisco for the annual love-in with Steve & Co.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Apple a lot. In fact I’m writing this post on my MacBook Pro with some sweet Mac software called MarsEdit. But I’m just not so sold on them that I overlook the somewhat obvious issues that Apple can have.
Lets start with the MacBook announcement. Better price, this is good, especially given all the “I’m a PC and I’m cheap” commercials of late. Also, finally removing the ExpressCard slot was nice. I’ve never used mine, and don’t think I ever will. But an SD slot would be so nice. Maybe not nice enough to pay for a new system, but this is a win. But a non-removable battery?? Seriously Apple, why? Every other notebook on the planet has a user changeable battery. So now I have to make an appointment with a “genius” and wait around while someone does this for me. Lame, not a win.
Snow Leopard. Big win here with the $29 upgrade price. Microsoft should really remember this someday. But then again, the list of new features is fairly tame. Sure there are under the hood improvements, but we’ll have to wait for the upgrade to see if its noticeable. The inclusion of OpenCL is pretty cool. I’ve been a fan of GPGPU for a while now and the usefulness of this could really be big, especially for compute intense apps like video processing or graphics apps. Not that it hasn’t been available before. NVIDIA’s CUDA package has been out for Mac OS, and could have easily been used to do much the same thing. The win with OpenCL is that it is a common standard that NVIDIA and ATI are at least somewhat on board with. So this could be a win if anyone writes apps to take advantage of it.
And now for the iPhone. I love the iPhone for many reasons, even though I don’t have one. It really kicked the wireless industry in the pants and finally got other companies really thinking about a true mobile computing platform. Unfortunately I still think there are some issues, most notably ATT. Verizon really screwed up when they passed on this.
With that said, the new 3.0 software seems like a good move in a few areas, although not as far as I would have liked to see it go. MMS support (finally) is nice, but is this really something to get excited about? I mean I’ve had MMS on cheap phones for years. Add to that that ATT won’t actually support MMS when 3.0 launches means this does nothing for anyone right now (well at least in the US).
Notifications is an interesting take on having “background” apps without fearing battery loss. Some of my friends who are rocking their 3Gs complain about battery life, so I can see where this might be an issue. But my Android phone has true background apps and I don’t have battery issues. I digress. So essentially you can register with some apple server and get push notifications on the phone that can be read with whatever app. This will be great for IM and the like where you can finally stay logged in and actually do anything on the phone. The big issue I have with this is that Apple controls the notification path. So crippling or removing services they dont like or don’t want you to have is easy. Also this is a single point fail for everything. Its better than nothing, but real background apps would have been so much better.
The 3G-S is interesting. No cosmetic updates at all, but then again the design is pretty much the coolest phone out there right now. The only thing that comes close is the new Palm Pre, but still. The 3MP camera upgrade was long long overdue. I wouldn’t even say this is a win, its a catchup. And video recording? My 9 year old little brother has a cheap Verizon phone and he takes pics and vids all the time and MMSs them to me. So no win there.
The compass is nice I guess. My Android has one, but I never really use it. I mean with GPS enabled Google Maps, why would I try to navigate on my own?
The claimed performance increase would be a big win if it is actually true across the majority of apps. But the biggest thing I read about the 3G-S was the improved battery life. This is the single biggest issue with mobiles, and the iPhone was hurting in that area as it was. So this alone would make me more interested in the phone if I was thinking about it. Which I would be, if I didn’t have to go to ATT.
Oh ya, the HSDPA+ addition. Meh. This isn’t cutting edge, many other phones with this support. The bigger question is can ATT’s network handle all these phones all wanting that much bandwidth. Will you see the 7Mb speeds in real life? Most likely not, unless you live in a small town in Kansas and are hugging the base station at midnight when everyone else is in bed.
Apple needs to be careful going forward with the iPhone. They are no longer the far and away winners in the smartphone world. The Palm Pre is a gorgeous device with a nice OS and a lot of good features, and once Android gets a better handset, it will be right up there too. So Apple needs to innovate, not just sprinkle some “updates” and hope to keep gaining market share. While they still hold the edge over Android in handset design, UI quality, and amount of apps, I think the Pre wins over the iPhone in several areas – background apps, better app management in the UI, and real background apps. If the Pre can get a sizable app base, this could be a bg problem for Apple.
