Once more it is time for Apple's WWDC and there has been much speculation over the past few months about whether or not Apple would release a new iPhone, and whether the final release of "Snow Leopard" would be announced. In this same time frame there have been good signs that both would be true.
There is a new 15" MacBook Pro with a non-user replaceable battery with up to 7 hours of life which is expected to last for 5 years. The top model also includes an SD slot, 3.06GHz processor, 8Gb RAM, and a 500Gb HDD or a 256Gb SSD. The expected prices for the different specifications are priced at $1,699, $1,999, and $2,299.
The next announcement is that the 17" MacBook Pro will have a price cut of $300, and there is also a new 13" Macbook with 7 hour battery life and an SD slot and has been renamed to be a Macbook Pro (surely that just means it's a 13" Macbook Pro then?). Moving on to the Macbook Air range there are further price reductions here of $700.
As usual when discussing OS X Apple couldn't resist having a dig at Microsoft about the failure of Vista and then announce they expect Windows 7 to fail also (I think it's about time they grew up and stopped name calling and pointing fingers) before moving on to what a success they think Snow Leopard will be. The new release is about 45% faster, and uses half the drive space that Leopard did. They've also made vast improvements to Finder by rewriting it. The final release of Safari 4 is also being released today for Tiger, Leopard and Windows (for XP and Vista). Snow Leopard also features Quicktime X, stacks within stacks, and various other UI tweaks. Improvements to Quicktime include the ability to share with YouTube, MobileMe and iTunes - similar to how you can with iMovie. What's great about this is that the new version will be shipping in September for $29 (upgrade price, full package is $169)! Now that's a good price for an OS, and I might be tempted to upgrade despite the mediocre features as it's now fully 64-bit and can support an unlimited amount of RAM. So that disproves the rumour it would be released at the WWDC, but at least it's not that far off.
Now onto what everyone is interested in the most - updates for the iPhone. To start with they discussed the iPhone OS 3.0 which features MMS (which AT&T don't support yet - ha!), Cut/copy/paste, shake to undo, addition of a universal spotlight to find anything on your phone, movie purchasing and renting via your phone, and support for tethering (ability to use net connection from iPhone on other "tethered" devices) with the exception of people using AT&T. As part of their MobileMe service they now also offer the ability to locate lost iPhones and the ability to remote wipe it - something which I think is potentially dangerous if someone gains access to your MobileMe account. There were also various other announcements regarding apps such as Tom Tom, and one to rival Amazon Kindle (will have to watch that one closely). The final release of iPhone OS 3.0 will be available June 17th, FREE to iPhone owners, but $9.95 to iPod Touch owners.
After those iPhone OS 3.0 announcements they said what everyone wanted to hear: the release of a new iPhone 3GS was imminent. Some of the rumours over the past 2 days did suggest the new one might be called the iPhone 3GS, and apparently the S stands for "speed" due to it being up to 3 times faster than the current model. It also features a new 3.2 Megapixel camera with auto-focus and video capture capability meaning of course the addition of some video editing applications. When recording video it does so at 30 frames per second and will automatically focus and set the exposure. Captured videos are kept with the pictures and can be sent to other people via MMS, or uploaded to YouTube and MobileMe.Another new feature which sounds kind of cool is that it now supports voice control for calling and controlling your music. The battery has been improved slightly with 9 hours of surfing time and 30 hours of "audio" time. New pricing is $99 for the 8Gb 3G model, $199 for the 16Gb 3GS model, and $299 for the 32Gb 3GS model. The new 3GS model should be available on June 19th.
I guess I know what gadget I'll be buying in just over a week!
