Apple’s WWDC 2009 Announcements

It was an exciting day today for Apple geeks like myself everywhere. The keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, CA always sets the world a-Twitter and today was no exception. The biggest announcements centered around the new iPhone operating system, MacBook Pro updates, and OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you two things:

1. I live in Montana, the “Land without AT&T,” so I don’t get to have an iPhone. I do, however, love my iPod Touch.
2. Those who know me personally will attest to the fact that I am nowhere near cool enough to pretend to not be impressed with Apple’s product announcements. Even though they didn’t announce the immediate release of a $15, 128 GHz 12-Core netbook with free worldwide 4G connectivity and a 1000-hour user-replaceable battery, I’m still an Apple fan-boy.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now…on with the news.

iPhone 3G S

A new version of the highly-popular iPhone is scheduled for release on on June 19th in the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. The iPhone 3G S (“The ‘S’ stands for speed,” according to Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller) brings a faster operating experience to the end user with a faster processor and more built-in memory and its ability to take advantage of HSDPA, a faster cellular technology.

Though the phone looks similar to the current iPhone 3G, it now includes a number of internal upgrades.

• A new camera allows iPhone 3G S users to control the focus by touching the screen or using an autofocus feature. Standard definition video capture is now available, as well.
• New headphones with a microphone, clicker, and volume controls allow easy access to the Voice Control features. Now you can voice dial or request music to be played on your iPhone without having to tap that screen.
• New hardware encryption allows users taking advantage of some of the new operating system features such as Exchange support or Find your iPhone (discussed below) to instantaneously wipe the data from their phone remotely and/or encrypt backups.
• Improved battery life, increased environmental friendliness, a built-in digital compass, and support for the Nike+ fitness accessory are also new features of the iPhone 3G S.

iPhone OS 3.0

Being the tiny little Macs that they are, iPhones (and iPod Touches) can have hundreds of features added or improved simply by upgrading the software that drives them. On June 17th, owners of the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G will be able to download and install the new iPhone OS 3.0. First- and second-generation iPod Touch users get to fork out $10 for the download.

Many of the 100 new features present in this operating system release were demonstrated at a press event in March. Some of the key features include:

• Cut, Copy, and Paste
• Landscape mode in all applications
• Push notifications for apps
• Spotlight search across the entire device
• Bluetooth-based peer-to-peer gaming
• Find My iPhone – This cool features allow MobileMe users to log in using a web browser and see where (on a Google Map) they last left their phone. It will also all you to play an alert on your phone to help you find it in the couch cushions. If your phone is stolen, you can remotely wipe all the data from the phone to keep out prying eyes.
• Turn-by-turn GPS-based directions is allowing companies such as TomTom to deliver live GPS navigation in conjunction with a cool suction cup cradle device that adds hands-free calling, power, and a louspeaker to your iPhone.
• Tethering (using your iPhone’s 3G cellular connection in lieu of of Wi-Fi for a Bluetooth-connected laptop) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Support – the ability to send photo or video messages) have been added in this release but won’t be available to users in the US using AT&T. Twenty-nine carriers will support MMS and dozens will support tethering at the time of the iPhone OS 3.0 launch, but AT&T isn’t one of them. Guess it’ll be a bit longer before your kids can send photos of their junk to each other during their middle school lunch breaks.

Safari 4

Apple’s web browser, Safari, reaches version 4.0 today. Safari 4, which has been in public beta since February, primarily offers speed enhancements. It’s available right now for both Mac and Windows by clicking here.

I’m not going to list the 150 features of Safari 4 here, so I’ll just point out a few of the more interesting ones:

• Increased speed – According to Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Safari 4 can execute JavaScript nearly eight times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari 4 can also load eight pages three times faster than IE and Firefox, according to Apple’s figures. By the way, please don’t tell me you’re still using Internet Explorer. If you are, close this window now, and come visit this site again after you download Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Thanks.
• Other features such as Top Sites, Full History Search, and Cover Flow for browsing bookmarks are all very handy.
• Most interesting to me (as a web designer) is all of the cool back-end standards support that Safari 4 offers. CSS Animation, CSS Effects, CSS 3 Web Fonts, CSS Canvas, Acid 2 and 3 compliance, SVG 1.1 support, and much more allow designers and coders to write more powerful, more accessible websites. The problem is, of course, that it will literally be years before the most widely-used web browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer) catches up, so we have to keep writing hacks for sites and dumbing designs down to work on that oh-so-popular browser.
• As a photographer, ICC Color Profile Support is nice to see. Images intended for display on the web should still be in the sRGB color space, but it’s nice to know that Color Profile Support is out there in browsers (Safari isn’t the only one, I believe.)

Snow Leopard

This item (and the next) definitely affect photographers. Snow Leopard, or Mac OS X 10.6, is scheduled to be released in September. We’ve heard about Snow Leopard before, and the keynote today gave us another glimpse at what it will offer.

In a departure from trends set by the last few major Mac OS updates (Tiger and Leopard, particularly), Snow Leopard focuses more on solid performance updates than flashy new features.

The biggest jump that Apple made here, in my opinion, was the decision to support only Intel architecture with this operating system. Those still working with an older PowerPC-based Mac will be unable to install Snow Leopard. That’s ok. The time has come. Even though I still have one PowerPC Mac in my arsenal, I’m ok with this decision. Removing all the extra code required to support both the PowerPC and Intel architecture reduced the footprint of the OS installation to less than half the size of Leopard. This should clear up around 6GB for most users.

The code for the Finder has been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of new hardware technologies such as multi-core processors and lots of RAM. 64-bit support will help programs like Photoshop and Lightroom really fly.

Quicker Time Machine backups, faster wake-up and shut-down times, built-in location services, automatic updates for printer drivers, and more efficient file-sharing aren’t as flashy as the dozens of truly new features introduced in Leopard, but they are a very welcome bunch.

MacBook Updates

This is, not surprisingly, the announcement that I’m the most excited about. You’ve figured it out by now, right? I’m a Mac user. I’m a huge Mac fan. I’ve spent years working with both Macs and PCs on a private and a professional level. You can get the same things accomplished on a PC that you can on a Mac and vice-versa (for the most part). However, anyone looking for a computer recommendation from me is only going to get a recommendation for a Mac. In my experience, they are so much cleaner, faster, and easier to use and maintain for almost all average users than a Windows-based PC. I know lots of people disagree. It’s like religion and politics, though. You aren’t going to change my mind (and I understand I probably won’t change yours if you’re a die hard PC geek like I once was), so don’t even try.

Ok…got that out of my system. Let’s talk about today’s announcements.

Almost all of Apple’s laptop line got a refresh today. Two really cool things to point out: They got less expensive and they are shipping immediately!

MacBook

The MacBook is Apple’s inexpensive, entry-level laptop. The upgrades today include a faster Intel processor, faster memory, and a larger hard drive. The $999 base model comes with the following features:

• 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
• 2GB DDR2 Memory
• 160GB hard drive
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card
• Standard keyboard
• White polycarbonate shell

You can customize this machine by maxing out the RAM at 4GB and putting in a 500GB hard drive. Not bad!

MacBook Pro

This is a true professional-grade, photographer’s laptop. I’ll be writing another article shortly on the exact specs I’d recommend, so I’ll try to keep my opinions to myself for the rest of this article.

There were a few big changes in this line…namely the promotion of the 13-inch Aluminum unibody MacBook into MacBook Pro status. The 13-inch MacBook Pro has two standard processor speeds available (2.26 GHz and 2.53 GHz) .

All of the MacBook Pros (13-, 15-, and 17-inch models) have built-in, non-user-replaceable batteries. Apple claims that they offer up to 7 hours of run time (8 hours for the 17-inch model). The built-in battery in the new 13-, 15-, and 17-inch MacBook Pro is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at up to 1000 full charge and discharge cycles.

All of the MacBook Pro models can now take up to 8GB of RAM. This is very good news. It was the only thing that was causing me to recommend that photographers go for the 17-inch MacBook Pro instead of the 15-inch. That changes now…more on it later.

The 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros now have a built in SD (Secure Digital) Card slot. Handy, but not necessary. I’m still using CF (Compact Flash) primarily, but I’m sure this will change. The addition of the SD Card slot removes the ExpressCard/34 slot that used to be in that location. Some have balked at its removal, but I’m a pretty high end user and, though I thought I’d find good use for it, I’ve never used my ExpressCard/34 slot. Shameful…I know. I don’t think you’ll miss it either. If you must have one, the 17-inch MacBook Pro keeps the ExpressCard/34 slot at the expense of the SD Card slot. You could always get an SD Card reader to put in that ExpressCard/34 slot, of course.

MacBook Air

The MacBook Air got a bit of a performance boost and a significant price cut. For $1,499, you can get a model with a 1.86GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. For $1,799, a 2.13GHz MacBook Air equipped with a 128GB Solid State Drive can be yours. The USB-to-Ethernet adapter is now included in the box with the Air. It was previously only available separately.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ll be following this up in a day or two with an article about the ideal photographer’s laptop. Your comments are welcome.

If you’d like to watch the Keynote address for yourself, it is available here.

Filed Under: News

Tags: apple • computer • iphone • keynote • mac • macbook pro • netbook • osx • snow leopard • worldwide developers conference • wwdc