Phew! They have said what they wanted to say. The high and mighty have handed down edicts on iOS7, Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks, the new Macbook Air, and iTunes Radio.
So, let’s start with the underwhelming first:
iTunes Radio: what can it do that Pandora can’t do? Siri takes your request, I guess. Editing stations on the fly, maybe. What else am I missing of consequence? Not sure, but personally, I go for Spotify every time and I can’t believe that Apple won’t be charging a premium for their service. As for ad-supported versions: there’s got to be a point when ads can’t support everyone out there doing the same thing.
OS X Mavericks: not underwhelming really, just not overwhelming as announcements go. It is professional, polished, and if you only go for multi-display handling, it’s grrrreat!
iOS7: everyone will talk about the design, the new icons, and the user experience. It’s what Apple is putting into its marketing. It doesn’t do much for me, but I am an Android user and my experiences so far as fine except when I don’t get proper reception or 4G LTE coverage and that’s AT&T’s fault.
Macbook Air: I have one of these and a Thinkpad. The Air is my guilty pleasure. My travel buddy. It is a superior notebook/laptop/ultrabook… who cares what you call it. All laptops should be designed like this sucker. it gets faster and more powerful: I say, Yay!
Mac Pro: I am going to say, Pain me impressed but I get blown away, literally by Dyson vacuum cleaners, and this is definitely the Dyson of computing. As far as anything else goes, this is the ballsiest design to come out of Apple today. And, it is an impressive piece of hardware. The downside is that the Apple premium, i.e., price, is going to make it difficult to see where this fits in on the computing spectrum.
All in all. Not a day to jump for joy or say, Wow. If Jobs was here, RIP, he would have probably made a better go of promoting the design innovation. As it is, Apple comes across as competent and a little self-conscious on this iteration.
I’d go to the guys at Ars Technica for the detailed analysis.
