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Open Thread: the iPhone, Apple TV, Steve's other announcements?

Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote

Apple - iPhone

Wow. Everyone here in the MacBreak war room is still perspiring as we let it all sink in. OS X. On your phone. Damn.

So what do you guys think about Steve's announcements? What surprised you? What else do you wish you'd heard? What do you think it will mean to have running OS X on your mobile phone?

JulesLt's picture

iPhone : Amazed. And this...

iPhone : Amazed. And this is version 1.0. Runs OS X and Safari better than my Mac. No spinning beachball. If I didn't know better I'd think it was a demo.

I was worried that Apple had made a strategic mistake - that the long term trend is against personal computers, and that MS were a lot further down the road in moving their business away from being based on sales of Windows PCs.

I think it also bodes well for OS X as a development platform - this phone is going to outsell Macs 10-fold. It's a great demonstration of Apple's strengths - seeing, and solving, the UI problem. The only dubious thing for me was how usable the web browser is - zooming in and out looks good but gets annoying - I tried using a PSP which has a similar size screen, but using non-optimised web sites was just too annoying. And there is nothing Apple can really do about that - the whole web UI paradigm just isn't optimised for small screens.

Tailored apps and widgets - like the Google Maps interface - will be where it's at in terms of delivering web content - and how much better do they look than any JavaME or mobile browser oriented application in existence? In retrospect, you can even see widgets in Tiger as a strategic move towards this type of UI, getting a developer community in place, etc.

I also expect we'll see the same UI in the next gen full-size iPod. Not sure whether it would/wouldn't include WiFi. If it did, it would be a perfect device for me - light web browsing and widgets, when I'm within range of the office/home networks.

AppleTV : I'm guessing it has Ethernet + WiFi because a lot of people don't have the bandwidth for wireless video streaming (what date did all Macs start shipping with 802.11g up??)

Airport Extreme : The picture here is tantalising :

http://www.apple.com/uk/airportextreme/sharing.html

I can't work out if the AppleTV can access a HD attached to an Airport basestation directly, or only via a Mac or PC running iTunes. I am guessing (from looking at the AppleTV setup) it is the latter - looks like it works the same way as setting up speakers on an Airport Express. Which is a shame . . .

 
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