Apple held the keynote address for their World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) today at 10am PST with the following announcements:
- Updated MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops;
- Safari 4.0 (non-beta) released for Mac/PC;
- Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) for Intel Mac’s coming in September 2009. Upgrade from Leopard $29 and family pack upgrade for $49;
- iPhone OS 3.0 with over 100 new features to be available on June 17th; and
- iPhone 3G available on June 19th with 16GB and 32GB memory–much faster then current iPhone 3G.
More details can be found at the Apple hotnews page.
My thoughts:
The upgrades to the laptop line continue to incrementally improve Apple’s offerings with some price cuts and greater performance. An updated 13″ unibody Macbook is now part of the “Pro” line.
I do wonder how the new integrated (non-user-replaceable) battery in the 15″ Macbook Pro will go over with some heavy users. It does have longer run time (7 hrs vs. 5 hrs) but there is no capability to have a spare battery for extended use.
Apple also moved away from the ExpressCard Slot found in previous models and has now included an SD card slot.
Snow Leopard’s low upgrade price of $29 for owners of Leopard is a wonderful surprise. I wonder how Microsoft will address Windows 7 upgrade pricing from Vista since in reality it’s no more then a Vista fix/upgrade. Will they match Apple’s low upgrade cost? I think Apple put some pressure on them.
The iPhone continues to evolve and improve with software developers releasing stronger applications and games. It’s a combination almost impossible to beat and todays announcements have taken much of the momentum from the Palm Pre launch this past weekend.
I am using Safari 4 now – and it certainly is just as fast as they proclaim. I was kind of hoping for some cosmetic changes to the iPhone – but that’s ok, it may finally be time for me to upgrade from my original. I could really use the faster internet.
I liked the notebook upgrades – especially because I will likely be buying one this summer. The 13 inch at a lower price is very welcome for me. Although I am trying to figure out if it has the same increased gamut display that they talked about with the 15″ one.
Mark: Apple made some changes to the interface with the final version of Safari 4…they finally moved the tabs under the address bar where they belonged. It is fast!
Not sure about the display on the 13″ MacBook Pro.
I found Safari 4 to be much faster. I plan to upgrade my iPhone but don’t know what to do with the old one. I was very pleased with the pricing of Snow Leopard.