Apple Keynote

I would be remiss if I didn’t address the Apple Keynote for the new iPhones that was held last week. While I should have posted sooner, I needed time to digest it all and form an opinion I was more or less certain of.

When Steve Jobs passed away there was a camp of people who were worried that Apple would lose its direction in the absence of the man behind Apple. I had hope that things wouldn’t change much in his absence. I had hoped that he had created a company that was self sustaining with creativity and innovation and would just keep going.

As it turns out, I fear that that group of people may have been correct. I’m not seeing anything exciting from Apple. There have been no game changers since Steve Jobs passed away, merely incremental updates to existing hardware.

Perhaps the ONLY exception to that is the Mac Pro, but it holds the moniker of its predecessor, even if it doesn’t hold the same form factor. The hardware in the new Mac Pro is very innovative, but it’s being used to run OS X, which is more or less unchanged since its release in 2000/2001. Yes, the skin has changed a little, the Dock is now 3D and there have been some changes under the hood to make it work with Intel chips, but it’s primarily the same OS it was upon its first release.

I’d like to see one of those new Mac Pros running Windows 8.

This sense of familiarity is something that Apple is banking on in many ways and, I believe, one of the reasons that people are jumping from Windows 8 to Mac. Say what you will about the differing OS flavors, but Mac and Win 7 were very similar in many ways – because OS X looks more like Win 7 than Windows 8 does. It boils down to people becoming afraid of change.

In my opinion, at any rate.

Getting back on topic…

One of the things that Steve Jobs had said was that he would never make a “cheap” iPhone. Apple wasn’t about making inexpensive products to gain market share. Jobs was never about whittling away the market share of Microsoft, it was just natural consequence of what Apple was doing that helped them grow their market share and their business. They were innovators and game changers.

Blackberry laughed at the iPhone.

Depending on who you ask, Google copied the iPhone or vice versa.

But regardless, the iPhone has continued to be the mascot of the Smartphone business – even if it has lost some of the share it holds to Android. But it is still in the top when it comes to manufacturers (though it maybe second to Samsung, but they leapfrog each other so much it’s hard to keep track of who’s currently the number one).

Again, Jobs didn’t care about that sort of thing. He created stuff that was awesome and that we needed, even if we didn’t know we needed it. Regardless of what you think of him, the man was a visionary, though he was a little overprotective when it came to his creations. I’m not going out spout off on any of the Patent litigation happening right now because, honestly, the patent laws for technology are draconian at best. They have not adapted those laws to fit into the quickly changing face of technology. I hate ALL patent litigation for technology currently.

I currently carry two phones with me – my personal phone, an iPhone 5, and my work phone, a HTC One. The HTC One is a better phone, in my opinion. That’s not to say that it would be better for YOU, but it’s certainly better for me. The exception being, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, iMessage.

iOS 7 is pretty, but it suffers from “ooh, shiny” syndrome. It’s a neat trick that it will give the display a look of depth, but it seems like a waste of programing time to me. Why not spend that time creating a widget protocol for the iPhone so I can have my Calendar and Email readily available on my home screen like I do with my HTC One? Why not find a way to make it so I don’t have to dig into every app that has a red badge telling me I should pay attention to it. I’ve got so many red badges on my iPhone right now it’s a little overwhelming.

They talk about how it’s the biggest change since the release of iOS, and yet I don’t see it. 64 bit processors for their phones? Unless they’re going to allow me to hook up a keyboard, mouse and external display, I don’t give much of a crap if it’s 32 or 64bit. It has no impact on my ability to play my games, read my email and surf the web. It’s certainly not going to speed up web browsing unless it somehow increases the bandwidth of the connection you’re using.

I think we’re moving toward an ability to carry a single device with us at all times. What everybody is shooting for is a computer that fits in your pocket and will do everything you need it to do. As I stated above, I think it would be pretty cool to take out my HTC One, plug it into a display and keyboard and launch a full version of Photoshop – of course in this daydream, the HTC One can run Android and Windows and has at least 256gb of storage and 8 gigs of RAM.

I think that Microsoft moved that direction more quickly than the others with Windows 8, providing the ability to create devices like my Yoga 11s which is a tablet and laptop all in one. While it’s a little heavy for most people to use as a straight tablet, I don’t have an issue with it. But more and more, you’re going to find these devices get lighter and lighter and become the only device you need.

And I think that Microsoft is leading the way.

If only people weren’t so afraid of change.

Tune in for my next blog where I talk about living a week on the Yoga 11s without using the touch screen – many have decried Windows 8 as being useless without a touch screen. I have some thoughts on that.