It's Only Apple, But We Like It

In one week Apple will hold its annual September music-themed event. This year the slogan on the announcement reads, “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.” Others say this is a Rolling Stones reference. I have no clue. I didn’t listen to the Stones. What I do know is that the announcement image this time around gives little-to-no allusion as to what may be announced at the event. No “hidden theme” so to speak. It’s just a shadow dancer with an iPod.

And what’s up with that? We haven’t seen Apple bring out the shadow dancers in at least a year or so. I do notice that the iPod the shadow dancer is holding has the cable coming from the bottom of the device. Perhaps he/she/it is holding an iPod touch? That would make sense. The iPod touch is practically the flagship iPod these days.

This brings me to chipping in my two cents on hopes and predictions of what may transpire next week.

iTunes

Let’s start with iTunes. The rumor mill has been saying we’ll see iTunes 9 with social networking integration. I suppose this means you’ll be able to tweet or post to Facebook whatever song you are listening to. Gag. I could care less. It just sounds like more feature bloat to me.

What I would rather see is for iTunes to get the Snow Leopard treatment. Few new features, major refinement. iTunes is still a Carbon app. (Carbon is the transitionary language used for porting Classic Mac OS 8/9 apps to OS X). With Snow Leopard, Apple ditched Carbon and moved everything over to native Cocoa. I mean, they even rewrote the entire Finder from the ground up. And it did wonders for the Finder’s performance.

iTunes has been begging for a revamp for a couple of years now, in my opinion. I’d like to see Apple rewrite iTunes from the ground up, throwing out years of crufty code that has built up and bogged down performance.

I’d rather see this than have social networking in iTunes. I have a feeling I’ll be disappointed.

iPhone OS 3.1

iPhone OS 3.1, which has been in beta with developers for a couple of months, will be available for the iPhone and iPod touch. I just hope it does for iPhone 3.0 what iPhone 2.1 did for 2.0. And that is to be what Apple should have shipped a couple months ago.

iPod updates

It’s basically a given that the iPods will get refreshed. My thoughts are short and sweet here.

The iPod touch will remain at current price points, but move to 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB. They will also see the inclusion of a camera. Many spy shots have surfaced over the past month showing this. If the photos are to be believed (and many do) it looks as if there is a pinhole next to the camera. My bet is that is for a small mic for video capture. Because video is kind of stupid without audio. The location of the mic makes sense for trying to limit the use of it to video capture. It would be odd to use a mic there for VOIP calls. And let’s face it, if you want to make a phone call on an Apple device, Apple would rather have you by an iPhone.

Internally, I think the iPod touch will gain a faster CPU, GPU, and more memory like the iPhone 3GS did earlier this summer. Externally, I think it will stay the same with the addition of the camera.

The iPod nano…I’m not sure. Traditionally, Apple has modified the overall design every year. However, rumors say the nano will retain the same design and gain a camera. This seems odd to me. Mainly because the iPod nano does not have Internet connectivity. See, the iPod touch has wi-fi, and can upload pictures to Flickr or MobileMe or wherever. The iPhone 3GS can upload video to YouTube and other services. Apple’s touchscreen devices have browsers and email clients. Cameras make sense.

Unless the iPod nano is getting drastically redesigned with a touchscreen (which would be cool, but I doubt it) I can’t see it gaining a camera. I really have no idea what Apple may do with the nano.

The iPod shuffle was just updated around 6 months ago. Perhaps more color choices than black or silver. Perhaps nothing.

That leaves the iPod classic. I think this is going away. Yes, it is iconic. Yes, it is the only iPod that holds more than 32GB of data. But if the iPod touch moves to 64GB, I think that seriously narrows the market. There is more incentive for a consumer to sacrifice some storage for the benefits of the iPod touch OS. Besides, how many people really fill up 120GB on an iPod?

Also, many of the manufacturers of the 1.8” hard drives that the classic utilizes are scaling down production drastically. Perhaps that is because Apple isn’t ordering too many of them these days.

The Mythical iTablet

Nothing to see here, people. Move along. Seriously, I’m not expecting the tablet this year. Developers will need time to makes apps for it. If Apple is planning to release it in 2009, it will get its own special event, likely in October. Why October? Because Apple has done events for the holiday season in October.

Steve Jobs

I think he’ll be at the event, he’ll do a little talking, but let other executives like Joz and Schiller do the heavy lifting, just like the November 2008 event when the unibody MacBook Pro debuted.

What do you think will happen next week?

One Year with the iPhone 3G

I want to share a fond memory from this past year that I’ve had an iPhone.

On July 11th, 2008, I nervously waited in line at the Village Pointe Apple Store in Omaha, NE. Home was about an hour away in Lincoln, NE. I was waiting to get my hands on an iPhone 3G. I was nervous because my wife was pregnant and due any day. Thankfully, our son waited until July 15th to enter the world.

I could have waited a week or so (yeah right!) to make sure our son was born before galavanting off to Apple Land to get an iPhone. But hey, I had plans! And they worked gloriously. See, I wanted to tell the world about my baby as soon as technologically possible. I had a first generation iPod touch at the time, but I had already scoped out the hospital to see if they had wireless. They didn’t.

Shortly after getting my iPhone, activating it, loading it up and putting some third-party apps on it, it was time to get down to business. I had also gotten a MobileMe account so I could wirelessly sync my contacts, calendar, bookmarks and push my email. Well, on my Mac, I composed an email announcing the birth of our son, leaving blanks for length, weight, date and time of birth, etc. I also created a MobileMe gallery with a placeholder image from my the unltrasound, and added that link into the email. Then I added everyone I wanted to receive the email into the BCC field, and saved it as a draft.

Sure enough, after my boy was born a few days later, I snapped a photo of him (after he was cleaned off), sent it up to Mobile Me, filled in the placeholders I left in the email, and hit send. All from my iPhone. I called a bunch of family. Then, a little while later, the phone calls from friends started rolling in.

That’s how the iPhone played an important role in the birth of my child. I’m sure someday, if/when we have another baby, an iPhone will play a role in that.

So that is one of my fond memories of the iPhone this past year. Do you have any special memories from using the iPhone? Leave them in the comments.

Besides the iPhone playing a role in informing loved ones about the birth of my son, other things have happened with the iPhone in the past year. However, I don’t find any of them to be particularly as endearing as the story I just told.

For starters, the iPhone, in my experience, wasn’t the best experience until the OS 2.1 release in September 2008. Before that it was a drag to sync the iPhone because of the excruciating length of time it took to run the routine backup. And there were other various bugs and issues, but I’m having trouble remembering the specifics.

And then in March 2009, the iPhone community started getting excited again with the announcement of added features in OS 3.0, which was released in June. OS 3.0 brought a lot of nice features. Nothing earth shattering, mind you. But it also brought its share of bugs. Most notably, there are a lot of stutters in graphical transitions and my battery life is worse than ever. Not to mention that I used to be able to connect to my home wifi without issue in my bedroom, and now I can’t at all. Granted, I’ve rarely felt the need to turn on the wifi on my iPhone since Lincoln was blessed with 3G last fall.

It sounds like many of these issues will be fixed in OS 3.1, which is now in beta testing. Maybe next year I’ll mention 3.1 in my Year Two post (if I remember to do one). Maybe with iPhone OS 4.0 (just guessing. Seeing a trend, folks) I’ll hold off until 4.1, which seems to be the trend for a truly stable OS.

Improving Memory

The other day I upgraded the memory in my unibody MacBook Pro from the stock 2 GB to 4 GB. The kit I selected was the Crucial 4 GB 204-pin PC3-8500 DDR3 1066 MHz. I bought it on Amazon for $58 (the price seems to fluctuate weekly between $55 and $70). This is much cheaper than the $150 Apple wants for a 4 GB upgrade.

The upgrade was drop dead simple. I just had to remove the battery plate, take out 8 screws, and pop the memory in. In fact, the biggest shocker when I opened up my MacBook Pro was that there was a fair amount of dust in the fans. This makes me think I’ll give the internals of my machine a visit every 6 months with the can of compressed air. Another note about the inside of this beast: Wow, it’s gorgeous in there. Geek heaven.

I made a little video for your enjoyment. The music is Audio Adrenaline’s Worldwide:One [iTunes] in honor of this being Worldwide Developer’s Conference week.

(As luck would have it, I shot this a couple days ago using my Canon G9, and two days later my wife gives me a Kodak Zx1 which shoots in high def. Oh well. Next time.)

Upgrading MacBook Pro Memory from Chris De Jabet on Vimeo.

Predictions: WWDC 2009

Apple is hosting its annual World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. The company’s Senior VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, will lead the executive team through the keynote presentation on Monday, June 8th.

Seeing as how that is just under a week away, I figured now would be a good time for me to weigh in on my predictions for what will happen at the keynote.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard & iPhone OS 3.0


Snow Leopard

It is a very safe bet that we will see both Mac OS X Snow Leopard and iPhone OS 3.0 at WWDC. Apple said as much in its WWDC press release.

So far, the general public hasn’t received a great deal of concrete information about Snow Leopard from Apple itself. The things we can expect for sure at this point are a full 64-bit OS; Microsoft Exchange support in Mail, iCal, and Address Book; QuickTime X; “Grand Central” – a technology that will make Mac OS X completely multicore aware; and OpenCL (Open Computing Language), which will allows applications to tap into the GPU for added computing power.

Overall, that’s a lot of geeky under-the-hood stuff that end users won’t explicitly see (but they’ll probably notice their computers become a lot more powerful). Apple said at last year’s WWDC that Snow Leopard wouldn’t introduce any new end-user features (like Exposé in 10.3, Dashboard in 10.4, or QuickLook, Spaces, and Time Machine in 10.5). Instead, Apple is using Snow Leopard to further refine the newest foundations within 10.5 Leopard.

Traditionally, Apple has charged $129 for major OS X versions. I surely know this because I have shelled out for 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5. Without some features that the marketing department can use to flash in end-user’s faces, I don’t know if Apple will be able to sell many people on 10.6. At least, not at $129, especially in this economic climate.

So either Apple will offer it for less, or they will have to add in something that is marketable to the masses. The rumor mill has been purporting that Snow Leopard will introduce an overhauled User Interface code-named “Marble.” This is quite possible, however, I am really liking the current Leopard UI. The only change I would really like to see to the UI is to get rid of the dated Aqua scrollbars and progress bars found in many apps (like Safari). Instead, replace them with the blue-ish grey scrollbars from iTunes, iPhoto, and iMovie.

I predict there will be some new UI paint, a surprise feature that Apple just couldn’t resist adding, and that Snow Leopard will sell for $99. We’ll also get a shipping date, my guess is around September.

iPhone OS 3.0

The new and improved iPhone OS will be the key feature of the keynote. Expect to see lots of third-party developer demos to ad nauseam. We’ll also see all the features we saw at the March SDK event, again.

I also think we’ll see some new features of OS 3.0 that will be exclusive to new iPhone hardware, which I will discuss in the next section.

Of course, we’ll get a final ship date on this as well. If I would have written this yesterday I would have guessed the ship date would coincide with the new iPhone hardware release (currently rumored for July 17). But, my mind changed today, and I think we’ll see iPhone OS 3.0 on all current iPhones within a couple of weeks.

Why? iTunes 8.2 was released today. For the past few betas of iPhone OS 3.0, a pre-release version of iTunes 8.2 was required to activate iPhones and iPods touch running the beta firmware. With iTunes 8.2 being in the wild now, and one of the key features listed was compatability with iPhone OS 3.0, I just think Apple is planning to release 3.0 very, very soon.

Also, Apple has been requiring that all apps submitted to the App Store be compatible with 3.0 for weeks now. I imagine this means ,most developers have already submitted, or are planning to very soon, apps that meet that requirement.

Finally, there is the snafu from last year’s iPhone OS 2.0 launch. Talk about a disaster. Last year, in case you don’t remember, Apple released the iPhone 3G, iPhone OS 2.0, the App Store, and MobileMe all on one day. And it was a complete meltdown. Apple rarely makes the same mistake twice.

I think this time around we’ll see iPhone OS 3.0 launch ahead of the new iPhone hardware. And I think we’ll see it within two weeks. Three at the latest.

A New iPhone

I’m not sure anyone doubts that there will be new iPhone hardware soon. The rumor mill has been flipping rampant with spy shots and the like. My thoughts on the matter are that the new iPhone will have come in 16- and 32-GB capacities, at the $199 and $299 price points, respectively. The 8GB model may stick around at a more budget-friendly $149, but I’m pretty skeptical about that.

Also, I think the new iPhone will have the rumored 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera, be video-capable, and have a magnometer (digital compass). Also, I think the flavor of iPhone OS 3.0 that comes on these devices will have added functionality in the Camera and Maps apps to leverage these technologies.

It’s likely a safe bet to assume that the device will sport a faster processor and more memory. Furthermore, many of the spy shots have focused on the back casing of the device, showing a plastic matte finish. I’m hoping so, for better grip and resistance to scratches.

Lastly, I have more of a hope than a prediction. On MacBreak Weekly 142, Scott Bourne said he had a couple sources within Verizon, one being high-level within the company, who said that Verizon would be getting an iPhone and that it would be announced in June. Now, AT&T is pretty decent in Lincoln, NE, where I live. But it is currently non-existent in South Dakota, where I’m from. So my iPhone becomes pretty useless as a phone when I visit family. If Verizon were to get the iPhone, I’d be finding a way out of my AT&T contract pretty quickly.

Granted, AT&T has announced they are coming to South Dakota in 2010-2011, but that’s quite some time away. And who knows what kind of coverage they’ll have. Judging from their overall coverage of Nebraska, it doesn’t look great. Outside of Omaha, Lincoln, and their surrounding communities, AT&T is pretty absent from the Cornhusker State.

Verizon’s coverage is nearly ubiquitous in the Midwest, and pretty much everywhere in the contiguous United States. Yes, this would mean Apple would have to make a CDMA iPhone in addition to a GSM iPhone, but I would think the amount of customers they would pick up in the US would make it worth it.So yes, I am really wishing for a Verizon iPhone.

Tablet Device

I think Apple is working on something like an oversized iPod touch to answer the netbook market, but I don’t think we’ll see it on Monday. I honestly think it would get a special media event all to itself.

MacBook Pro/MacBook Speed Bumps

I think we’ll see some speed bumps on the unibody notebooks. However, they’ll either get one slide in the keynote or be relegated to a post-keynote press release.

The Triumphant Return of Steve Jobs

I think Phil Schiller will do a One More Thing™ and that will be to welcome Steve Jobs back from his medical leave. I think Jobs’ stage time will be brief and at the end, but I think he’ll be up there nonetheless.

That’s all I have for predictions and hopes/dreams. We’ll see on June 8th!

If you have any thoughts, please leave them in the comments.