Thoughts? Concerns? Expectations met?
(or did I miss the thread elsewhere?)
I’ll announce that I like Granny Smith apples.
I was hoping for a new iPhone, so I’m vastly underwhelmed.
I missed it, but I heard they discovered something new called “cloud computing” that apparently allows you to store all your personal photos in a big cloud somewhere, for up to 30 days!
What a world we live in. <resumes whittling>
Fuji’s my fave.
My 2 year contract is up next month and my phone’s starting to look like crap. So I’m hoping for a September or so new phone.
Just picked up the iPhone 4 on Verizon’s network (released 3-4 months ago, I think), so I was hoping AGAINST a new phone announcement 
From all the leaking that has been going on, the most common consensus is something like the 3GS. A considerable upgrade to an already existing model. People have been speculating that this will happen around September.
I couldn’t stand the awful battery life on my original Droid so I got the iPhone 4. It seems crisp with a good battery life. Switching to iOS will be difficult but I should be able to manage.
I heard one rumor from my friend at Verizon that the iPhone 5 will have a facial recognition feature allowing security without passcode. I can think of all kinds of problems with that, but maybe they have other security features to provide adequate protection.
That would be terribly easy to fake if you just held a picture of the iPhone’s owner in front of the camera.
I was generally pleased with the wwdc keynote. I wasn’t expecting any hardware news (it was a developers conference after all), so getting a peak at OSX Lion, and where the Apple landscape is headed was good enough for me.
I’ll be interested to see how the iOS-like features in Lion play out. So long as the OS is as robust as Snow Leopard, most of the changes/features look good to me.
I really hope Versions gets integrated into most of my main production apps… That’s a really elegant way to keep tabs on that.
I’m a bit baffled by the iTunes Match thing. For $25.00/year, you can get all your ripped music put in the cloud. Doesn’t this completely destroy the iTunes music store? Wouldn’t everyone just rip music from their friends, do the “match” thing and legitimize it? It seems like they’ve just given everyone on the planet license to steal all the music they want for $25.00/year. There must be more to it than that, but for now, I just don’t get it.
how would it be different from music subscription services? I’m sure a good portion of that $25 goes to the labels.
Well, it’s only $25.00/year. That’s about what a label would clear from 2-3 CD purchases. The Zune pass was $15.00/month. And you end up with a DRM-free copy of the music from Apple, so they can’t shut it off if you don’t “re-up” for the next year. (I’m assuming that the music isn’t necessarily streamed from the cloud but can actually be downloaded into your devices at home.)
I was interested in the legal ramifications of this (I just opened a Great Debates thread about it), but you make a good point, it would be very easy for people who downloaded MP3 files from “shady” sites to be able to use them from iCloud as well.
Maybe Apple won’t let you download the files from iCloud to your personal computer? And maybe the system they use to match songs between your copy and the iTunes store copy will be able to detect at least some “illegal” copies? (though I can’t imagine how)
My main issue with all these cloud services is that they seem to assume that everyone has infinite bandwith at their disposal. The infrastructure is not there yet to support this kind of service. People with DSL aren’t going to want to watch a movie beamed from the iCloud (unless iCloud implements a Netflix-style compression/buffering system.)
I’m happy about wireless syncing. I don’t yet understand how it will work or if it will do what I want it to do, but I’m hopeful.
I like podcasts. I don’t like having to sync my phone just to update my podcasts. I want my phone to sync over WiFi automagically. If this cloud thing will keep my podcasts up to date, I’ll be happy. Heck, I’ll even pay 25 bucks a year for it (though I understand that is for a different feature set).
The heretofore necessity for synching iDevices to a computer has been a major problem for deployment of these devices in our business application. I’m delighted to see that they are “cutting the cord”, assuming it works as well as claimed.
I was really hoping for at least a hint at what the iPhone 5 might be like. I’m out of contract now, and want to upgrade my 3Gs but don’t like the 4 enough to commit, I want more. There’s a Motorola and a Samsung that are pretty sweet, and compete if not surpass the 4 right now. The Samsung has a 4.5" screen that I kinda am drooling over. I really need to be wowed by the 5, and kinda soon, or I’m gonna just go with a Droid. If my 3Gs craps out before the 5 is released, Apple definitely loses, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who will do that!
I like the idea of that as well. My mother gave me an iPad at Christmas, and of course everyone wanted to try it. But I couldn’t do anything with it until I got back to my apartment and set it up through iTunes on my PC. With this new approach, I would have been able to set it up right away, using my parents’ WiFi network. And it means that some people will have just an iPad, iPhone or both, without needing to own a computer from which to manage them.
That’s what I wonder, though. In all the articles about cloud computing one important aspect is almost always totally glossed over. It assumes that one has reliable, fast internet connectivity 24/7, usually via WiFi. At least in my experience that’s hardly a given. I get frequent internet slowdowns, outages, etc., no matter where I am, with every internet service provider – home, office, or on the road. It’s just not as reliable as having the document or music file, say, on your hard disk.
My wife has a pretty new iPad, and her one big annoyance is that it drops the WiFi connection all the time, for no apparent reason.
I suspect the devices will synchronize when files are available, not when you request them…it doesn’t matter then if it takes 10 seconds or 5 minutes, just so long as it’s already there when you ask for it.
The OTHER glossed over thing is security…are my documents and photos flinging through the clouds in the clear?
In our particular business application, plentiful WiFi is a given. Obviously, this is not the case for every application.
Or you could have set it up with iTunes on your parents’ computer so everyone could play with it, then reconfigure it when you got home.
Uh - you’ve been able to rip all your friends’ music for free for forever now, all without a $25 fee.