Stuff I expected, under "one more thing ..." (or earlier):<p>The Mac Pro ships with enough bandwidth to drive three 4K desktop monitors, yet Apple's most recent monitor -- the 27" Thunderbolt Display -- dates to 2011 and has the same resolution as the current 15" Macbook Pro. Bluntly, this is disgraceful. Serious video folks are going to be buying Mac Pros and then paying ASUS three times as much for the monitors! <i>Where's the Apple 4K Thunderbolt Display?</i><p>A keyboard cover -- like the Logitech Ultra-thin Keyboard Cover, or Microsoft's Surface keyboards -- would be nice. (I suppose Apple are relying on the after-market, as witness the startlingly fast announcements by Belkin et al.)<p>Finally, the "software is free" announcement ... yes, they're taking aim at Microsoft, but iWork 5 on OSX turns out to be a mixed blessing; there are regressions all over, <i>especially</i> in scripting (they've virtually dropped AppleScript from their office apps). What is this, an attempt to build market share for MS Office? (The mind boggles.) What other power user features have they planed away in the pursuit of a clean and consistent user interface across all platforms? (Which in practice seems to mean dumbing down the apps on the Pro platform -- OSX -- for compatibility with the mass market platform -- iOS.)
There's another story on HN that says, "The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones." That's actually my exact situation with Apple right now. My iPad Mini, iPhone 5, Mac Pro, Apple TV and MBP are all more than adequate. Making them gold or shaving off a few ounces isn't very exciting.<p>The iPad was released less than 3 years after the iPhone. Now we're three years past the release of the iPad with nothing new to talk about. I'm sure there are exciting things happening under the hood at Apple, but the event was a bit boring.<p>Apple should also rethink their television ads. The style they popularized has become trite and they ooze with self-importance. The iPad mini video with the pencil reminded me of Facebook's terrible Chair ad. I miss the lightness and humor of watching a John Hodgman riff with what's-his-name.
"We know Microsoft’s tablets suck"<p>This irritates the hell out of me. Who is this "we"? Fine if Marco wants to suggest that they suck, but I'll take a shot in the dark and say he hasn't even tried to give one a fair shake...would love to hear from him if he actually has.<p>I have never found a use for a tablet, but I have several around my house including iPad Mini, iPad 3, Nexus 7 (1st gen), and now a Surface. The Surface is the best of those devices and the only one I can see myself continuing to use going forward.<p>I would challenge anyone to just open their minds if they haven't tried one and jump in completely for a week or so then make up your mind. Definitely not saying the device is perfect, there are some things (both hardware and software) I'd like to see added but it's a damn nice device!
"We know that effectively nobody browses the web on their Android tablets full of stretched-out phone apps."<p>this is false. android tablet browsing is substantial and growing fast. Looks like 25% in july 2013 in this graph, up from 15% in july 2012.<p><a href="http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-usage-browsing-share-region.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2013/08/reality-android-tablet-...</a>
He's not wrong. The presenters kept saying slightly the wrong words and having to go back and correct themselves. The constant untucked-shirt comments were painful, and completely out of their usual presentation style.<p>The Mac Pro is absolutely hilarious in it's pricing. When converted back to USD, it's almost 30% more expensive in Australia for absolutely no understandable reason. The fact that it wasn't released is very strange too, along with it's very vague "December" date. Makes me feel like they expected to be releasing it but ran into problems with their process.
For me the most notable parts of the whole event were the software-related announcements. Nothing about any of the hardware was in the least bit surprising. My notes:<p>- The Mac Pro is still not available. I don't believe it's ever been like Apple to pre-announce something this far out.<p>- The iPad update was the first not to make me want the new one. I'm perfectly happy with my iPad 4 and see no reason to update yet.<p>- An iPad Mini with a Retina display is nice, but I've never been attracted to that screen size so it doesn't do much for me.<p>- There was no "One more thing..." or anything more surprising than them making all of their consumer software free.<p>- There were brief mentions of new versions of both Aperture and FCPX, but that was it. I only found out later that the Aperture update is just a small dot update and now requires Mavericks.
"We know that effectively nobody browses the web on their Android tablets full of stretched-out phone apps."<p>Really? I use my Android tablet all the time and love it. So much so, I'm switching from an iPhone to and Android phone. In turn, this also makes using a Mac computer far less important for me.
So we're way past criticizing a thing somebody makes. Instead we're criticizing the "product messaging" that goes along with the thing.<p>The complaint seems to be that this event, despite all the time spent on the usual "The things you fans bought have indeed turned out to be very popular, yay for you" message, didn't deliver the same sense of materialist cult excitement that some people had become accustomed to.<p>And that apparently is generally viewed as a criticism worth making, worth discussing. It's considered important.<p>Hm. Well what do you know.
Oh jeez. It's almost like there's a certain ... legendary source of charisma and showmanship missing. Give the hand-wringing a break. Steve Jobs could have changed his <i>wardrobe</i> and people would say it would have had an impact on the feel of the presentations. Now the guy's dead. Of course they're different.
If you ask me, the entire "games" black hole looks for all the world like they're on the cusp of something that isn't <i>quite</i> ready.<p>They introduced official gamepad support coming to iOS7 at WWDC, both standalone gamepads and iphone/ipod-wrapping cases. A couple MFI partners even teased things to come. And then... nothing.<p>It became actually real in the release of iOS7. The iPhone event even dedicated some serious stage time to gaming and a few higher-profile apps were updated to support it. But, still, nothing.<p>The iPad event came and went and they didn't even <i>mention</i> the iPod Touch, let alone gaming. I don't think they've <i>ever</i> talked about the iPad without talking about gaming.<p>So I wonder if the event was "off" because a tent pole feature, something that encompassed phones, tablets, ipods and maybe even the appleTV, just wasn't ready to go.
From the footnotes:<p>> <i>Let us continue to believe that these are relevant industry events rather than giant commercials!</i><p>Why? Oh, why is it so hard to confront the reality that is right in front of their eyes? IT IS A GIANT COMMERCIAL, FOR FUCK'S SAKE!<p>This is the point where it becomes impossible to avoid comparisons to religion. You have a basic admission of someone who wants to keep believing in an illusion rather than exercising any kind of critical thinking.
<p><pre><code> The lines were so tightly scripted that the presenters often stumbled off-script slightly,
and rather than rolling with it naturally, they’d just jump back and awkwardly retry the line.
</code></pre>
The "I'm a a big fan of The Black Knight" (instead of Dark Knight) part was especially painful :/
I loved Craig's Hair Force One joke, but those two guys teasing each other during iWork demo were just annoying, that was too much.<p>Also, I think it was one of them going something like "it's just gor- beautiful." He probably realized he used "gorgeous" in previous sentence so he changed it to "beautiful"... Well, I didn't believe him.
It feels to me like they highlighted the minimum amount of stuff they needed to get out the door before the holidays. Lets be fair - there was a _ton_ of stuff announced. Maybe too much which lead to the lack of flair and detail.<p>I do think they've announced major refreshes - it seems to me that many products brought in features that have been years in development (e.g. Touch ID, 0.5 lb off the Air, Mac Pro, etc). I'm not saying these things were huge - it's just that any kind of getting any kind of multi year effort to line up while still keeping the normal plane flying is really hard work.<p>I personally think the current lineup is really good. Sure there's a few bits missing (notably there are apps in Mavericks which missed polish and touch id needs to be everywhere), but it feels to me like each of their hardware lines are now at a really rock solid iteration.<p>Software wise, the lineup feels even more integrated if you're an all apple customer.<p>TL;DR - it feels like they're getting their lineup up to a solid level baseline before using that as the base for the next set of awesome stuff, but hey - I could be wrong :)
Yes and no. Yes, it was obvious that the presenters didn't have that "natural burning feel" of Jobs. But that was obvious since Jobs is gone.<p>No, the product changes are still the right ones:<p>I have iPad 3, but I've bought iPad 2 for my parents. Whenever I go to them and use it I am impressed by the slightly lighter and thinner feel of it.<p>Now the iPad Air is significantly lighter and thinner than iPad 2. If you have any other iPad, wait to try the iPad Air, then tell me if you still think it's not a big improvement.<p>Ditto for iPad mini. If you have the present one, wait until you can try the new, then tell me it's not significant. I'm quite certain I'm going to by it, just to take it with me to the places for which I consider "full" iPad too big. Now it's retina, I'm sure it's the best device of that size. Is it too little? I'm considering best as "best that money can buy" not "best when I want to give as little money as I can." And if you're not using Apple tablets then this won't change your mind: others make cheaper stuff and it's still so.
Apple is in a tough spot, and these rollouts really reflect it.<p>Jobs was such a perfectionist in message delivery that anyone else doing that on behalf of the same company just is not going to measure up. The expectations are so high, and nobody carries that persona. I'd rather personally see the voice of Apple change to something I can identify with, and that voice just isn't there. If anyone at Apple is listening, just so you know...the company has no voice at the moment.<p>The rock-and-hard-place is the product offering. Frankly, the products haven't really advanced all that much in the past few years. There have been some improvements, but improvements are to be expected, and everyone tends to deliver incremental improvements. Those improvements certainly don't measure up as a premium. The days of massive lines for product releases, the waiting all night for the next iThing...I just have a hard time expecting that those are going to be on the order-of-magnitude to what we've seen in the past.
They are still doing Steve Notes. Give them a bit of a chance to learn to do it another way. If anything, it shows how good Steve Jobs was at these things.<p>I know there is a "CEO must do these" thing, but I would prefer if they left the keynotes to Phil Schiller and Craig Federighi. The rest can appear in the videos.
I think all we know what we're witnessing here, even if some people are afraid to say what it is.<p>This isn't the first event since Jobs' death, but I think 2 years is about right for the momentum that he left behind to start running down.<p>Even if Jobs was pushing Apple to build shiny consumer-oriented gadgets, he was still <i>pushing</i>. Nobody can replace what he brought to the company.<p>P.S. I'm not saying it's the end of Apple. I'm sure they can keep making good stuff for a long time. I'm saying that this is an inflection point, where Apple is now moving away from Jobs' vision and towards someone else's. Anything that started under Jobs is wrapped up now, and what we're seeing today is wholly the product of this next phase of Apple.
I generally agree with the post. It was so dull that I didn't even finish watching. And I couldn't believe how much Cook was stumbling over his lines. I always though they did tons of rehearsals. And they do have teleprompters, right? (maybe that's the problem).<p>I realize Apple/Steve nailed the presentation format and many are trying to copying (and some, like Samsung, are trying to stray from it). But maybe it's time to shake it up a bit. Every event feels exactly the same, even the general structure and collection of stats and retail store openings. Apple is creative and smart. It should figure out the next format/style.
Apple has never treated games much of a priority and it's always felt to me that the success of games on the iPhone/iPad has been a happy accident and they have no idea what to do about it, other than to continue to build great hardware and improve graphics tech.<p>If Apple was more of a games oriented company and concerned itself with the market I think we would have seen the controller API years earlier, actual gamepad hardware from Apple and a more powerful Apple TV with a games oriented App Store.
One of the biggest things Apple will have to manage going forward is the issue of backwards compatibility. The Windows ecosystem has had to deal with this for a long time. Windows XP was released twelve years ago and the installed base is huge. For the most part you can still use any current Windows software with XP and anything in between.<p>Apple is somewhat famous for summarily killing off whole product lines in the interest of technological innovation. I get it. No issues there.<p>However, as their installed base expands it will be increasingly hard for the average person to stomach the idea of their expensive computers or iOS devices becoming obsolete. Not everyone lives on the bleeding edge. In fact, most people don't.<p>It'll be interesting to watch what happens. It sure feels like the rate of innovation might have slowed down a bit. Thinner and lighter only go so far.<p>There are a few surprising things here and there. For example, I can't understand why Apple didn't acquire Bump [0] and and tightly integrate that capability both iOS and OSX. Google grabbed them instead. We'll see what happens.
>Part of it was the lack of surprises, which isn’t Apple’s fault.<p>For the iPhone announcement, I would have agreed. That was unsurprising due to supplier leaks.<p>For this event, it was completely Apple's fault, because there was nothing really that surprising. A lot of "that is some very nice engineering" but nothing to really make competitors go "uh oh, we gotta go back to work and catch up."
Jobs always seemed to express a genuine sense of wonder about what he presented on stage. And, given his personal history in technology, he could kind of pull it off in a sort of "who knew we could ever get here from two guys in a garage with a soldering iron?" sort of way. While I respect the current team, I'm not sure they can pull of that tone as well, and so I think these product presentations suffer a bit.<p>Otherwise, I didn't watch live, but I wasn't particularly disappointed or anything. Despite the hype, Apple events are always kind mostly dry affairs you can catch up on later with just a few minutes of reading. With the exception of new product line launches, which obviously can't happen three times a year.
"...the iPad Mini probably somewhat reduced the demand for the Touch"<p>The $229 / $299 price reduced the demand for the Touch. I'm surprised they haven't found a way to get a sub-$200 Touch.
Apple has a very nice product line. No one can deny that. That said, after looking for a new machine for my wife and checking out the Apple lineup, I went with a Dell. For full disclosure I work for Dell Software, but this was a home computer for my wife and I wanted something that would make her happy. You pay a LARGE premium for the name. You get much more hardware for the buck with Dell. You may like the OS better on the Mac side, but honestly - is the Mac OS more stable than Windows 7? In my experience no. Is it easier to use? [hint - try to uninstall a program], in my experience no. Windows, while not as trendy, is a good workhorse that does its job well. My wife needed to do video editing, web surfing and word processing. I got her an 4th gen Intel i7 with 12GB of RAM and a larger display than the iMac for a much better price. If you honestly separate the hype from reality, you'll realize you're paying a significant 'Apple tax'. Of course, if you need to use XCode to develop for iOS or some other reason where only a Mac will do, by all means, buy one. it is great. But if you want to have value for your money and don't use Xcode, I think there is nothing wrong with using a powerful PC.
I think what Marco is missing is Mavericks. Sure developers have known about it for a while as have the tech press but to the average consumer Apple announced a brand new operating system version yesterday, released it the same day AND made it completely free. That's a pretty huge announcement. Especially when it was alongside lots of updated and now free software, new iPad's and new Mac's.
We're in sort of a weird place with mobile computing. We're in the part of the technology/market growth curve where it's easy, for some, to make a killing with comparatively little effort and innovation. The iPad mini is a perfect example, it's mostly just iPad 2 guts with a smaller screen and battery, but they sold like crazy and made an even crazier amount of profit for Apple. And to some degree rightly so, they put a device in people's hands that they wanted.<p>Nevertheless, when the rewards for laziness are so high what incentive is there to take on risk? There are negative incentives, in fact, because any amount of effort or resources spent pursuing something risky will likely come at the cost of working on something safer. If the safe and lazy thing is sure to bring in billions in profit then even if the risky things succeeds it might end up being a short-term loss due to opportunity cost.<p>It's obvious that things like the iPad are the harbingers of the future. But at the same time it's just as obvious that the iPad does not represent anywhere near the final evolution along those lines. It's clear to me that consumer OSes will increasingly be like modern mobile OSes, with managed apps, streamlined UI, and even more streamlined administration. But the idea of there being such a gulf between a desktop with a keyboard and mouse on the one hand and a touch-only tablet on the other is mostly an accident of history. As well, the idea, from Windows 8, that there should be a single UI model that spans both portable (touch only) and stationary (keyboard and mouse) realms is ridiculous.<p>There should be a lot more innovation, a lot more development, and a lot more trial and error out in the market today. But until the market dynamics change we'll likely be stuck with a lot of lazy designs for a while.
<i>"[...] iPad 2 sticking around for</i> another <i>year, shamelessly at the same price as last year."</i><p>I also found that a bit jarring. A 4-to-5 price ratio relative to latest model, which has much better processor, screen and weight ... it's hard to justify.<p>Perhaps it's because of the cheapest Mini price acting as some sort of backstop.
I got the exact opposite impression. This event seemed refreshing, presenters were funny, and there were some suprises (new and free iWork, free Mavericks). It was also well paced, they didn't use as much "amazing" and "magical" as they did in Stevenotes. Overall I liked the event a lot.
Couldn't agree more. Not launching the game controller or talking up some big new release, like Oceanhorn, whilst teasing the Apple TV gaming could have really put a dent in the somewhat-weak line-ups of gaming systems that are going big this holiday.<p>What a waste, Apple.
Regarding Marco's footnote #1, I'm not entirely sure if I agree. At WWDC, I thought the 'Designed by Apple in California' [<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXFGjponC0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXFGjponC0</a>] video added an air of magic (excuse the metaphor) to the whole charade. Considering these events go on for quite a while, surely a bit of overly-produced footage can't go down too badly?<p>I'm glad that this was only a minor point, and that the main issue, that the speakers currently seem to lack vivacity (exception of Federighi), was highlighted as a major issue.
What comes next? We are seeing the same trend with smartphones where each new device is more powerful then the one before. At some point they will pack so much CPU, memory, storage and gadgets (bluetooth, wifi, sensors of all kinds, etc) that it will be unlikely our apps will need more powerful devices. The industry will move to something else (which I have absolutely no idea what's going to be) and the smartphones makers will be the PC makers of the future.
These are the consequences of tying your company's brand up in the RDF of a Dear Leader. No matter what Apple does, they're going to be criticized of missing an intangible quality of innovation or genius, because Apple's visionary is dead.<p>Tim Cook's number one priority should be untangling the Jobs cult of personality and Apple Inc. And I definitely don't envy him.
This is the whole tech industry...<p>I realized a few months ago hacker news has become boring. I don't really care much for the incremental updates, which is the entire hardware industry. Even the internet has become pretty boring.<p>We're all excited for the promises of the future, and as usual they're taking a lot longer than we want them to.
This is a situation where changing the original title would've been useful, and you don't even have to come up with your own title, just use the original article's first line:<p>Something felt a bit off about this week’s Apple event. [Was: Off] (marco.org)
Or maybe it's that they were over-excited at the previous presentation and showed a bunch of stuff too early. The previous one was overloaded with stuff. This one was a little light.
Correlates to this Ask HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601148" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6601148</a>
it is happening again. Apple (aka macintosh) is trying to squeeze blood from a rock. Three rocks actually. They didn't learn the first time. Innovation has died yet again at Apple. This time though they have an cash cow (iTunes) on hand to keep them going while they pump out junk for the next x decades. Microshaft 2.0 has hit the shelves.