A blog about life amidst technology.

Apple’s WWDC Announcements

My sum­mary with notes inline.

Apple.com

New Mac­Book Airs

  • Faster proces­sors, up to 2GHz i7 in speed
  • Upgrade­able to 8GB of RAM (pre­vi­ously lim­ited to 4GB)
  • Up to 512MB of SSD stor­age at twice the speed pre­vi­ously available
  • USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 in a sin­gle slot rather than two sep­a­rate slots like most laptops
  • $100 less than the pre­vi­ous models
  • Ship­ping today

Save your money. Buy a Mac­Book Pro with retina display.

New Mac­Book Pros

  • Quad-​​core i7
  • Faster mem­ory
  • Faster graph­ics processor
  • USB 3.0

Save your money. Buy a Mac­Book Pro with retina display.

Next Gen­er­a­tion Mac­Book Pro

  • As thin as the Mac­Book Air (0.71 inch)
  • 2880 x 1880 res­o­lu­tion Retina display
  • 220 pix­els per inch
  • Up to 2.7GHz, Turbo Boost up to 3.7GHz
  • Up to 16GB of RAM
  • Up to 768GB of SSD storage
  • USB 3.0
  • HDMI port
  • MagSafe 2 (trou­ble — more adapters for everyone!)
  • Thun­der­bolt
  • Ship­ping today

Link to Apple​.com

Start­ing con­fig­u­ra­tion at US $2,199.

Watch the Apple promo video

Updated Apps for Retina Display

Moun­tain Lion

Moun­tain Lion is the next ver­sion of OS X

  • New doc­u­ments in iCloud. Store, sync your doc­u­ments in iCloud. Apple​.com info on iCloud
  • Mes­sages app for send­ing iMes­sages from your Mac (hope­fully much improved over the beta that’s been really buggy thus far)
  • Reminders.app sim­i­lar to Reminders on your iPhone/​iPad that sync via iCloud
  • Noti­fi­ca­tion Cen­ter with a very impor­tant fea­ture: “Tem­porar­ily dis­able ban­ners and mes­sages — if you con­nect to a pro­jec­tor, they’re dis­abled automatically.”
  • Voice dic­ta­tion built in
  • Safari updated with a uni­fied search bar (like Chrome)
  • Open tabs in Safari are synced between your Mac, iPhone and/​or iPad
  • Power Nap fea­ture which allows the Mac to keep up to date while it’s asleep, com­pat­i­ble with recent Mac­Book Airs and the new Mac­Book Pro with Retina Display.
  • Air­Play Mir­ror­ing — allows you to send your screen (i.e. Keynote) to an AppleTV equipped TV
  • Game Cen­ter sync­ing between your Mac and iOS devices
  • Only $19.99 USD upgrade, com­ing in July via Mac App Store and on new Macs

Link to Apple.com’s sec­tion on Moun­tain Lion

iOS 6

  • Siri is improved — Inter­na­tional sup­port, includ­ing Canada, so hope­fully other new things like Open Table/​Yelp inte­gra­tion, find­ing movie times and auto inte­gra­tion (hands free direc­tions) work for us here.
  • Siri can now launch apps, which is nice.
  • Siri comes to the iPad
  • Face­book inte­gra­tion for easy shar­ing of your pho­tos of your cat.
  • New phone app with finer con­trol over Do Not Dis­turb options, reply to a phone call you can’t take with a mes­sage, geofence an area to remind you to call some­one when you leave or arrive.
  • Face­Time is enabled over cel­lu­lar data, not lim­ited to wifi anymore.
  • You can unify your phone num­ber and Apple ID. So if some­one calls your iPhone, you can answer that call on your iPad or even Mac. Same thing with iMessage
  • Improved Pho­to­Stream that allows you to choose peo­ple to share them with
  • Passbook.app to store all your passes (i.e. board­ing pass, Star­bucks cards, park­ing pass, etc.)
  • Guided Access for chil­dren with autism.
  • Sin­gle app mode locks an iPad to one app so stu­dents can’t switch to Safari to look up answers on a quiz. Or, as @jessejanderson reminded me — let­ting your tod­dler play with an iPad and have access to just one app.

Maps is the big fea­ture that they saved for near the end. Turn by turn nav­i­ga­tion sup­port, uses anony­mous real-​​time crowd-​​sourced data for traf­fic flows it can alert you to a dif­fer­ent route that might be quicker. You can ask Siri “Are we there yet?” Beau­ti­ful 3D flyovers.

Link to Apple.com’s iOS6 section

Com­ing this fall, sup­port for iPhone 3GS+, 4th gen iPod touch, and 2nd-​​gen iPad+.

Ini­tial Thoughts

No Apple TV that will change the world but given all that they announced, the only peo­ple who should be dis­ap­pointed are the dumb pun­dits and rumour mon­gers who worked every­one into a frenzy say­ing it was coming.

Same with a new iPhone. That’s on a yearly cycle now in the fall.

The Mac­Book Pros with retina dis­play are going to be huge. Just like see­ing a retina enabled iPhone or iPad, once you use one your cur­rent Mac­Book will look old and busted. So my advice stands as it did for the new iPad — just don’t look at one and you’ll be fine.