WWDC ’08 Stevenote Post Mortem

If you’ll recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about what I expected would appear at WWDC ’08. As it transpires, it was a rather surprising event.

• The iPhone: This made up the bulk of the Stevenote, where Steve Jobs was also (unusually) assisted by Scott Forstall and Phil Schiller. The 2.0 firmware is almost complete and will appear next month – I was surprised it wasn’t complete by now, but I suppose they’re just being careful with a few final sweeps for bugs. The actual revised iPhone wasn’t surprising from a hardware perspective: 3G, lower price, GPS, similar case design… but I was surprised that the case is now almost all plastic instead of all aluminium. The new feature list is somewhat disappointing, although thanks to the iPhone’s nature it shouldn’t be too long to see a change to this. O2 are also going to offer it on a pay-as-you-go tariff, for an unconfirmed price. However, I can’t take much credit for this. The 3G iPhone was the worst-kept secret in history.
• Mysteriously, the rumoured new MacBooks didn’t appear. This was surprising, although the amount of iPhone stuff they got through probably restricted what else they could get in the keynote.
• Mac OS X 10.6 was announced – it’s called Snow Leopard, and not Cougar as I expected. I was right in that it’ll concentrate on polish and performance; however, it’s hard to see Apple resisting the temptation to shoehorn a few new features in, including a few aesthetic changes. However, it was only mentioned briefly in the keynote.
• The Mac Mini and Blu-Ray SuperDrives were not mentioned, which is also quite surprising, particularly for the former. Said machine hasn’t been revised for around a year now, indicating a revamp of the line may be imminent. I suspect both the Mini and new MacBooks (if any) will appear at a similar event to the event the revised iMac appeared last year, so at this rate we could be looking at August.
• MobileMe (a new synchronisation service which also features .Mac’s old functionalities) wasn’t much of a surprise: it would have been insane for Apple to build in the push PIM, synchronisation, remote kill, etc if it could only be used by enterprises with Microsoft Exchange. I also like the idea of being able to sync my Eee, my iMac, and my phone’s address book, although whether or not it likes Linux is another matter. I suspect it will.

Overall, the Stevenote was something of a disappointment. It was interesting to see what they had to show us, but it concentrated heavily on the iPhone. This is very surprising.