Under-whelmed.
Monday 09 June, 2008
WWDC 2008 will be remembered for the launch — albeit in one month from now — of the worst-kept secret of ’08 and very little else.
MobileMe launched — providing a web-based version of what many other mobile synch tools provide out-of-the-box — that takes over where .mac left off and finally, Snow Leopard — sounding very much like an equivalence of a Windows Service Pack at best.
That isn’t a bad thing, mind. Stability is a sore-point for many Vista users looking for something different and, perhaps, better. But the amount of coverage for things not-iPhone was appalling.
Sure, the iPhone finally makes it to a wider global market without requiring various hacks. However, we cannot buy one now. Buzz surrounding the all-new device will have well and truly peaked before this thing actually hits market.
I awoke at 5am this morning, with expectation zinging over what might await me. I needn’t have bothered. A (not so) new phone, talk of an updated OS and a mobile service all of which aren’t actually here yet.
I really think Gruber has nailed it when he talks of what Apple’s announcements at WWDC this year really mean:
“The physical phone is not the story. A year from now, the iPhone 3G will be replaced by another new model. The platform is the story.”
Yes, it’s clear they are going to sell billions of phones. At circa US $199 how can they not, surely? Although it’s not entirely clear if that is actually based on AT&T contract pricing. It’s anybodies guess what that actually translates to outside of the US and how much it will end up costing to buy outright.
Watching the keynote isn’t all that inspiring. It’s simply going through the motions of officially launching everything we already new and confirming the pre-event speculation for the most part. WWDC ’08 is basically an all-singing-all-dancing version of their future road-map.
And that’s why I feel a little, well, let down by Apple. What they seem to have forgotten in all this new “sans-one-more-thing” world, is that I, the potential user, still need to feel important, that what I’m being offered makes me feel, well, cooler.. and that it really will be worth my time. Sure, there is a strong developer angle here. I get that. But we’re not all developers and as such we still look to these events and keynotes for inspiration.
I need assurance that Jobs and Apple are on the case. That they’ve got mega-cool-shit happening right here and they want me to be a part of it. Being told to wait a month for a yet-to-be-priced phone doesn’t make me feel cooler. Not being told availability or pricing doesn’t make me feel cooler. Not having anything else up their sleeve, really isn’t at all cooler. It’s just not assurance.
So we’ll see what Apple come up with moving forward. One more thing.. just not today.
