WWDC ’11 was about software. I am absolutely satisfied with only minimal complaints about their hardware offerings. I would like Time Capsule to be updated and I’d like the Mac Pro to drop in price. Finally, I’d love to see an affordable 30″ Apple LED Display followed by a beautiful set of wireless loud speakers to accompany the iMac under $99. These are my hardware wishes but Apple is in a place where their hardware could go unchanged for another year and they’d still be ahead of the competition. Apple’s WWDC announcements were overdue.
Lion: Mac OS 10.7 may be Apple’s final cat. Good riddance. It’s not that I’m against the cat naming scheme; I just feel tired of Mac OS X and I hope the functionality of a desktop class operating system will remain as Mac OS evolves into a touch interface with more of a similarity to iOS than it does to the Macintosh we know. iOS Home and iOS Mobile is where I see this going. I’m okay with that as long as I can stay just as productive and can still plugin a keyboard to my iMac once the system has gone completely touch. Since 10.5, Mac OS X hasn’t changed much in the interface or break-through features. I’m disappointed by that and 10.7 just added more complexity. Explaining where the scroll-bar went to my parents and showing them Mission Control and other OS X features that arrive in Lion will be very complicated. I may just ignore this update for them and keep them on Snow Leopard. There’s no point in talking them into upgrading or explaining that a reinstall of the OS will be to install 10.5 then 10.6 then 10.7. I hope Apple starts from scratch soon and I hate that this is how things went down. Luckily, no one really cares about the Mac anymore when you compare it to iOS. iOS is installed in over 200 million devices and there are only 54 million active Mac users. That’s the reality. Apple understands this as well and Mac OS will become iOS home eventually so I won’t make too big of a fuss about it.
10.7 has some exceptional features that really wow me. As a geek, I’m thrilled about nearly everything that’s included and I finally feel that need to go out and purchase a Magic Trackpad. I thought it was cool before and now I feel it’s essential for my iMac and I love that it fits neatly against the keyboard and will replace the gross old dirty mouse-pad that takes away from the aesthetics of my glass home office desk. The improvements to Lion are great but it’s difficult to really talk ONLY about Lion as so much about what makes it great is iCloud. Full-Screen Apps are a welcome addition as I LOVE writing in Pages.app full screen and have since that feature came to pages 2 years ago. I’m writing Full screen in MarsEdit right now and it’s sort of a full screen hack but the benefits are there and making that a system level feature will change how I commute. I don’t care about a Twitter screen ticking by or Mail.app bouncing or IMs interrupting me. I do all of the social interactions on my iOS devices. On my computer, I want to go full screen and become involved in the work. This is why I’m writing this at a cafe with headphones on and Wi-Fi turned off in full screen MarsEdit. Zero distractions helps me write better.
Mission Control looks interesting but I don’t multi-task on my Mac. I do but not to the level where Expose’ needed improvements. AirDrop would be good if I was using my Mac in an office environment but Spotlight certainly needed an overhaul. I keep my Applications folder incredibly organized and launch with Spotlight but launchpad will be great for people coming over from iOS and it looks really nice. I may never use it. The AutoSave features and version control is nice. Windows Vista, 7 and Server 2003 – 2007 have had Versions for a long time but it didn’t look as beautiful. Locking documents and the such is nice. I think those are just playing catch up with Windows but the auto save is incredible. An extension of that is the ability to reboot to exactly the same state as you were after Software Update told you to reboot (which is the only time I reboot my Macs). It’s almost magical to shut down a computer and to come back 30 days later like you never left without using the battery in sleep mode. It’s really magical.
$29 means that everyone will upgrade. This is great for developers and Apple. Apple can sell more App Store for Mac applications and make sure iCloud goes to the masses which means 3rd party devs can make sure their apps support iCloud which means I can finally replicate my OS experience on my iMac and MacBook Air beyond just Mail and Contacts.
iOS 5: Most people think I’m insane when I critique the UI of iOS and the pages and pages of apps and folders and how you launch those apps. Fine, so I’ll stop complaining since it won’t change any time soon. iOS 5 is not going to revolutionize how we computer on the go but it is going to refine this experience and continue to grow the marketshare as many of these additions simply play catchup with other mobile OSes. Android has had a pull-down notification drawer and Facebook integration. Windows Mobile has lock screen widgets and Nokia provided camera shutter buttons long ago and RIM had BBM long before Apple even had a mobile operating system. Most of what is new with iOS 5 is old to other players but these are features Apple needed to bring people from those platforms to Apple’s. The media and fanboys will say that their OS had x feature first but my non-techie friends will say, “oh man! The cool iPhone has something like BBM! Finally!” Well, Blackberry users may still wish iPhone had a physical keyboard but this is a step in the right direction as iPhone will never have a physical keyboard.
I love everything about iOS 5. I’m skeptical about iMessage and changes to Mail simply because they complicate things for new users. People understand SMS and copy / paste on iOS but will they get confused with the double tap in Mail shows “indent / dictionary” as well? Also, iOS 5 has a new iPod app that was redesigned. We saw it for 5 seconds during the keynote when Eddie Cue bought a Bruno Mars Song. It looked ugly. We’ll see but it’s not like I have much of a choice if I don’t like it. The new icon was overdue as the iPod icon on iOS 4 looks like an old iPod Classic which Apple would like us all to forget about. Really, why did they make it look like the iPod classic from the beginning?
iOS 5, like Lion, will benefit most by iCloud. iOS 5 and Lion without iCloud would have been a huge mistake. So, let’s move on because I feel like iCloud is the big news here and the only news that matters as Lion and iOS 5 saw radical changes but nothing revolutionary. Our lives will be bettered by the new software Apple announced at WWDC but not revolutionized. iCloud however is big. Let’s dive in.
iCloud Replaces MobileMe:
I gave six requests for what I wanted iCloud to be in a previous blog post:
- iTunes Cloud (my music everywhere)
- Syncing Via MobileMe (made free)
- Back to My Mac (improved to Windows PCs)
- My Files Should be Everywhere (accessible from anywhere)
- OTA Updates and Syncing of all iOS Devices
- Safari Saved State Across Devices
Of those, Back to my Mac was not announced as being improved but Lion’s feature page did say you can designate approved users by their AppleID instead of having to create a user account so they can remote control your computer by logging in with their AppleID and Lion will let them remote control the Mac without the current user knowing so it shows someone is logged in but they’re working in another session. This is great. Files being everywhere was almost fulfilled but not completely. Safari saved state didn’t happen but it might be added to iCloud later. I have no clue why that isn’t included.
Everything else I listed did happen. iTunes Cloud wasn’t quite what I was looking for but remember that my wish was a very ambitious personal wish but I figured that record labels would get in the way. iTunes Match is HUGE for those of us who have loads of music. iTunes Match is capped at 25,000 songs and I’m 3,000 short of that number and I’ll be signing up at $29 per year because it’s amazing. Actually, let’s take a step back and dive deeper into iTunes in the cloud.
If you bought a song via iTunes, you can access that song anywhere. You install iTunes on your work PC and you can download every single song you’ve bought with one click to iTunes. Pretty amazing. If you didn’t buy the song via iTunes and got it from CDs or another method, Apple will scan your library in a few minutes and try to match it to a song that they have in their database of 18 million songs. If matched, they’ll keep a record of that and allow you access to those songs via any iOS device you sign into or up to 10 devices like a work computer. Of note, 10 devices means computers and iOS devices. They’re all on equal footing here. Any song that is in your library that Apple does not have in their data store will be uploaded to Apple’s servers and it is my understanding that Apple will not charge you extra to store those tracks (as long as the number doesn’t exceed 25,000 tracks). Remember, Apple is very confident that their catalog of 18 million songs will match well with most of the music in our libraries. It won’t always but this kicks Google’s and Amazon’s asses. They ask you to upload all of your songs to their service and 20,000 songs on Amazon’s servers will cost you roughly $200 a year to store. Apple just matches your songs to ones they already have and delivers those to you if you request them at $29 per year.
iTunes in the cloud is free for songs you bought from Apple and you only pay if you want to send up the other songs you didn’t get via Apple and you’ll never pay more than $29. An added benefit of this is that when you download those songs to your work computer or iOS device, iTunes will send you the 256kbps AAC version of the tune so if you have Beastie Boys’ Album from the 90s that you imported into Windows Media Player at 64 kbps and then you threw the CD away, Apple is allowing you to get the upconverted version of that as a part of iTunes Match.
I have a few questions though:
- If I stop paying for iTunes Match and I’ve used it to transfer 21,000 songs to my work computer, do those all go away magically?
- Is there a length or file size limit? I have a few 2 hour long DJ sets from festivals. Do those get transferred up and over as well?
- If I have an album that is in Apple Lossless (at 10 megabyte per song) from guys like BT and Ben Folds, do those turn into the 256kbps AAC iTunes Music Store version when I download them to my work PC?
- Currently, I have my iTunes library stored on an external 2 terabyte drive and I mirror that once a month to another 2 terabyte drive. Can I rely on iTunes Match as a backup for all of my music? Can I theoretically install iTunes freshly and login to the store and download all 21,000 of my songs from iTunes Match with one-click assuming my house burned down and I needed to start over?
- Will this ever replicate to my apps, books, movies, podcasts, tv shows, music videos? Will iTunes in the cloud store / keep record of all of those as well in the event iTunes or my storage completely goes kaput and I need to start over? If so, iTunes Match is worth $30 a year even if you don’t have a ton of content. It really can be your in the cloud content server that you can use to restore from if you have a complete loss of data.
Let’s move on though because I just spent way too much time talking about iTunes in the cloud.
MobileMe’s Mail, Contacts, Calendars and Documents Storage has been given an EOL (end of life) classification and will be retired in June of 2012. You have time to remain on MobileMe so if you bought it recently, you can keep using it but if you bought it very recently, you can get your money back. Mine expires in September so I’m just going to stick with it and get iCloud when available. The huge change between the current MobileMe and iCloud is that “The Cloud is Truth” according to Mr. Jobs. Currently, MobileMe thinks your computer is truth or that the most recent change data of any one appointment, email or calendar appointment is truth. This is sort of how iCloud works but not quite.
Currently, if I update the same appointment on my computer at the same time as my iPhone or if I take my computer offline and move an appointment and then move it on my iPhone, I’ll plug in my MacBook and get an error from MobileMe that I need to replace the version on MobileMe or do some sync that merges the entire data set again. This happens to me once a week. Supposedly, with iCloud that will go away. The rule is, the Cloud is the truth so it will super cede anything I did offline regardless of change date. The computer is not any better than your phone. The computer is just another device and they both ping iCloud to see what’s up.
iCloud Documents is ultra cool. Apple is finally building this into iOS and Lion so the iWork suite of apps talk to each other and you technically have a home folder on the go (as I mentioned in that blog post about iCloud feature requests). Your home folder syncs up to iCloud (not everything, just documents) and is accessible on all of your Macs and those documents are accessible on your iOS devices if the developer integrates them. The guys at Culture Code that make Things for iPad, iPhone and Mac should have no further complaints as to why they can’t get tasks synced across your devices. iCloud will be their solution. Developers can use iCloud to make anything you do on your device portable to the next and it all syncs in real-time just like MobileMe. This takes MobileMe from a couple of cool things to EVERYTHING. This actually exceeds what Microsoft Exchange Server can do. MobileMe was Exchange for the rest of us (Apple’s Quote, not mine) and iCloud is “Exchange? Why in the hell would you use that?” Also, Mac OS X Server Lion is only $49.99 so you can do group calendaring, contacts, mail and collaboration (wikis, file sharing, etc) for the price of a sushi dinner in SF. This is HUGE! Exchange for most people is now dead. I still love exchange but iCloud makes me think that I could live without Exchange for most things.
The beautifully designed MobileMe Web apps like Calendars and Mail will transfer over to iCloud so you can view those appointments and emails from anywhere.
Photo Stream looks good but not too incredibly useful beyond novelty as far as the whole “take a photo and see it pop up on your iPad, AppleTV and iPhoto library. It’ll be a godsend to people like my friends who don’t sync their iPhones very often but, then again, now that Wi-Fi syncing happens every night at home, most of my friends will be syncing their iPhones automatically every night without even realizing it. So, Photostream doesn’t really solve a huge problem. The one place I can see this useful to me personally is that I often do a TON of photo work in Adobe LightRoom and then I import the finals back into iPhoto for my own storage repository. If the last 1,000 photos in iPhoto are available on my iPad and iPhone, I can show off my latest photos to friends and families very easily. Currently, I use MobileFlickr to show my photos to friends but I have to load each photo in the app and that takes time. Photo Stream should solve that issue. Then again, that’s going to use a TON of my 3G data connection to keep that always up to date. I put 1,000 photos into iPhoto every week. I don’t think that’ll be very good for my iPad’s Verizon connection that is capped at 3 gigabytes a month. We’ll see. I’m not sure how that will play out.
The good news is that it’s all free. Free, Free, Free!
Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo and pretty much every other company that provides services like this should be very very afraid. Apple’s iCloud is still very much an Apple-centric thing. Google Apps and their offerings are Linux, Mac and PC and Apple’s iCloud works best if you have an iOS device and a Mac. It will work with your PC but the experience won’t be as good. Of course, Apple doesn’t mind if you buy a Mac to go along with your iPhone. they’d be thrilled.
There’s more to iCloud but I think this blog post is long enough.
Conclusion: Apple finally took time away from new hardware to improve their software and now it would appear that this end to end solution simply can’t be stopped. Apple’s ecosystem is an expensive one but it’s one that will improve your life assuming that you buy into everything. Spent $1799 (iMac) + $999 (MacBook Air) + $499 (iPad) + $199 (iPhone) + $79 (Magic Trackpad) + $499 (Time Capsule), etc and you can have a terrific computing experience. The list of Apple gear you can buy for the perfect setup is pretty mind boggling but, if you do buy in, it’s a wonderful experience and one that can’t be matched by any other manufacturer. Apple makes thousands on each customer while the others guys make $299 when you buy a PC every 3 years. I feel bad for the other guys right now.