WWDC Results

So I was mildly disappointed with the keynote, the hour on Application demos was somewhat unnecessary. I think Apple could have converted that into website feature videos, and it would have been sufficient. But Apple didn’t have anything else in the chamber so to speak, so they had to fill that time with something. As I previously suspected, Apple might have planned to spend some time on demos, but needed to fill that space with a change of plans within the last month as Intel delayed their Montevina platform until July 14th.

My iPhone prediction was off target some. I was always a skeptic of the subsidization tactic, but it happened anyways. Its good that it’ll get more people into the iPhone game, which is great for developers and Apple when it comes to selling apps on the AppStore. My date was off, the phone is due on July 11 and I had predicted June 27, so a two week difference. Back in March, my predictions had put the phone in Q3, so it seems I had become a little eager for the phony in moving the date up into the end of the second quarter, though I’m still not off that much. Likewise, one of my options for the iPhone price with subsidy scheme did come true – the iPhone got subsidized $200 and the price didn’t really change, so we have the 8GB iPhone3G at $199 and the 16GB at $299.

The final SDK didn’t ship (or at least Apple isn’t calling it the final version, just “Beta 7″). So that was incorrect too. I’m beginning to wonder if Apple may keep pushing back the iPhone AppStore date. They can probably shut it off on the 2.0 firmware if they had to, and then just enable it with a 2.0.1 version when they’re ready. This may bode well for me if the AppStore keeps being pushed back further since I need more time to finish my game, and would allow developers to test on the 2.0 hardware.

I was correct in Apple usually working in groups of three – we had the iPhone SDK, a brief and uninspiring mention of Snow Leopard, and the iPhone3G.

Speaking of Snow Leopard, the jury is still out on that one, especially whether or not it’ll run on PPC and what hardware it will support. There were no big user interface function improvements according to the chatter so far, the bulk of the improvement will be on the backend, with OpenCL for GP-GPU usage (using GPUs to accellerate computing tasks) and the Grand Central system for working with multiple cores. This is probably in response to the fact that the next generation Nehalem is going back to hyperthreading (enhanced over what was in the P4 of course), and with 32nm and the coming of the 4-core standard at the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, this is Apple’s last operating system before we see the relavance of quad-core computing come to the consumer level.

One of the things we could see out of OpenCL is the ability to transcode videos very quickly. Imagine your iMac being able to transcode videos on the fly for your iPhone or iPod by using the GPU. The biggest issue is encryption (maintaining it) during the transcode, though its really no big deal if you’ve heard of Handbrake.

At this point I’m looking forward to a July or August special event where we see the new MacBook Pros and MacBooks available, with aluminum cases and lower wattage CPUs for extended battery life. We’ll probably see revised MacBook Airs as well, possibly to feature the Penryn mobile CPUs instead of the last generation. We probably wont see an increase in clock speed (probably just drop the 1.6GHz speed) and the RAM is unlikely to change from 2GB, however I would expect the price of the SSD add-on to drop. Prices are in freefall right now – SuperTalent just released 120GB 2.5″ Micro SATA SSDs for $649, the 64GB SSD add-on that is available on the MB Air now is $999. Its possible that the 64GB/80GB range of SSDs could be at the $350 price point by the end of the year, with transfer rates around 100MB/s read and 40-50MB/s write, speeds that exceed the 1.8″ HDD now in the MB Air.