- If you still think Apple is losing interest in the Mac, I hope the only site you write for has .blogspot.com in its URL.
- Siri is, of course, Apple’s answer to “what’s next after search,” but in a way, it also seems to increasingly be Apple’s response to widgets. Just like widgets, Siri offers access to increasing amounts and types of compartmentalized data. In this context, Apple is liberating more and more data by letting us use one interface to search for or learn something, instead of making us hop in and out of multiple apps. But it’s doing this with a very specific, unorthodox tool and interface that not everyone will enjoy or is able to use. I love Siri for when I’m at home or in the car, but you sure won’t catch me using it at a coffee shop or walking around town. When I’m out, I’d much rather glance at a widget.
- I’m a little surprised Apple brought the Retina display to the 15-inch MacBook Pro first. I figured it would start small with the 11- and 13-inch Airs (since they’re closest in size to the iPad), then ramp up to the Pros with larger displays. But I guess it makes sense, since the 15-inch is the workhorse. Developers need some way to build all these Retina-ready apps on-the-go, right?
I’m also surprised that Apple brought the Retina display to the MacBooks by creating an entirely separate price tier. I figured it would wait until the cost of larger Retina displays could simply be worked into the existing models to keep the lineup nice and simple.
- It’s nice to see Apple hit so hard with such a broad array of new products at once. The consumer side of WWDC (the keynote) is typically low key with one or two announcements. But Apple trotted out a whole bunch on stage and quietly released a few more. It’s much better than the time Apple delayed its desktop OS in favor of its mobile OS and sparked a bunch of silly speculation that Apple stopped caring about the Mac.
- “Ships today” is the Apple I’ve been missing, the one that originally caught my ear when I got my first Mac—a 12-inch PowerBook.
- Yep, China is a really big deal.
- Regardless of how you feel about Facebook, it’s great to see Apple and Facebook work out whatever the problem was. This is a really big deal, as Facebook’s 900 million users plan events, commune in groups, and put Flickr’s photo library to shame. Actually, planning events with friends has become one of my favorite uses for Facebook, as it’s much more useful and far less spammy than Evite and any of its competitors. Now you can optionally see your Facebook events and contacts right alongside all your others, and all automatically updated. Imagine: when your friend updates their phone number or email address in Facebook, it can automatically update in your contacts. And it only took Apple until 2012 and a major social network partnership to nail this one down.
- Apple isn’t showing any interest in endowing iOS with Gatekeeper, the new Mountain Lion feature that lets you pick between installing Mac apps from everywhere, trusted developers, or just the Mac App Store. Microsoft doesn’t allow this on Windows Phone 7 either, so Android is probably your only hope for pressuring Apple into changing its mind. Don’t hold your breath.
- Almost none of my “back to basics” wishes were answered in iOS 6. Photos added to an album still live in the Camera Roll and screenshots are not treated differently or spared from Photo Stream. We still can’t set third-party apps as our default browser, mail client, twitter client, calendar, or media player. There is nothing like OS X’s AirDrop to let me easily send a photo or file from my device to yours, whether we’re in the same room or miles away. About the only thing I can tell so far is that Apple moved Bluetooth preferences and a toggle to the top level in Settings.
