Federighi’s hand didn’t tremble on stage this time around as much as it did back when he presented Lion’s new gestures in 2010. He’s still a bit awkward, his timing is not quite perfect yet, but his improvement has been dramatic. Some puns were a little overboard (especially the backstage hair skit), on several he didn’t quite feel the crowd very well, didn’t let the set-up simmer, or control his pace and incessant weight-shifting —but when he delivered, he delivered. Even the “OS X Weeds” bit. This man took the role we thought good ol’ Phil Schiller would inherit. He is the new face of Apple, and he’s doing a great job at it.
Tim delivered his same over-inflected superlative snooze-fest, but we know Tim is not a products guy. He is, and always will be, the numbers guy, even if some of his metrics are contested.
Beats is somewhat of a strange occurrence. Apple is acquiring a wildly popular brand and mixing it with its own. Of all the other companies they have acquired, Siri is maybe the only other one that has gone as far as showing up as a product name, except nobody knew about Siri, and everyone knows about Beats. How will it work?
They are similar companies considering they both carry aspirational products with fantastic margins, they cater to the same audience with excellent marketing , but as any other audiophile can confirm, Beats’ success is not based on product quality, as Apple’s is. Adding the fact that Jimmy Iovine bad-mouthed Apple’s earphones on stage for Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in CodeCon the very next day that the announcement was made, and the differences start to arise. What was not made clear is if he was referring to the EarPods or not, the product that Apple proudly announced two years ago after three years in R&D. Not that it mattered anyway, it shows no class within the ranks in a time where Apple’s tone, even about the competition seems borderline amicable. Their values differ. But damn was it a great move buying them.
Streaming has become the norm, and the damage of playing by last decade’s playbook is starting to show. Instead of building yet another attempt at cloud services, efforts they are known to botch, why not just buy the one with the icon rapper and the record label CEO? $3b barely makes a dent in their $158b cash reserve, anyways. We attribute a lot of iTunes’ success to Eddy Cue’s fantastic deal-making abilities, but now Iovine’s weight is necessary for the new equation.
Continuity looks like the promised land. If it works as advertised, it would help bring iOS devices out of that “not for production but consumption” stigma. The idea is beautiful, even openly suggested some time ago, but calls and SMS integration blew every prediction out of the water. For OS-agnostic, multi-device users, a seamless application state sync between devices is very luring to buy into the full ecosystem.
Flat design looks decidedly beautiful on the desktop. Dark Mode even more so. Jony Ive’s reign has come full circle, Scott Forstall’s skeumorphism be damned.
The new Alfred-like Spotlight raised some eyebrows, and immediately prompted a reaction from the developers, as several other new iOS’s features lifted from other apps or OSes did too.
This is Apple’s biggest announcement in recent memory. A complete surprise for everyone — and the crowd went berserk.
They know the importance that from this point on, Swift is the foundation for all of Apple development, and its shows from its impressive feature set. This huge bomb validated the true spirit of the conference, as the media watched as the particularly young crowd hailed at every keystroke in the technical demo. John Syracusa must be glowing.
HomeKit and HealthKid are the real announcements here, Apple’s interest in the Internet of Things dawned with the iBeacon, and these are the new platforms that pave the way.
iCloud Drive and AirDrop now do what we thought they would do from day one, inter-app communication is what we thought we would have long ago, and Messages is now an amalgamation of features from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and most notably Snapchat.
Apple is checking off boxes all over the place, and introducing new plays in the game that they command. They exude freshness, joviality and openness, but most importantly focus. They keep telling us that this year’s product pipeline is supposed to be “the best in 25 years”, and given the heft of this year’s announcements, the remaining half of the year looks like it will be a barrage of hardware gunfire for the holiday season. That iWatch better include a free pair of Beats headphones.
In the meantime, I can start counting the days until I finally install Swype on this thing.
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