Apple WWDC Keynote, iPhone3G, and Snow Leopard

Steve Jobs can do what he damn well pleases, thank you very much. If he — and team Apple — demon­strated any­thing in yesterday’s WWDC Keynote address, it’s that. Because frankly, they took their stage time yes­ter­day to demon­strate a whole lot of old news, and they buried the hid­den gems.

WWDC Keynote Snooze

Part of the chal­lenge was all about bad tim­ing. In a spe­cial event months ago, Jobs took the stage and told the world that the iPhone SDK was com­ing, that all devel­oper prayers would be answered, that they would have access to the iPhone core API’s, allow­ing the masses to write apps just like Apple does. They would just have to wait. Be patient. It’s coming.

Then, they seeded the devel­op­ers. Cer­tain devel­op­ers. OK, not very many devel­op­ers. Still, the appli­ca­tions that were teased out of the process looked good. Really good. The world was get­ting excited.

June. WWDC. iPhone3G has been leaked. The furor and frenzy about this next gen device is at an all time high. Devs are count­ing on Apple to deliver. The pub­lic is pay­ing more atten­tion to this devel­oper con­fer­ence than ever before. They’re track­ing secret ship­ping man­i­fests for boxes on the way to Apple stores. They’re lin­ing up at the retail loca­tions for this prod­uct that has not been announced. It’s a drum­roll of a mil­lion crazed fetishists at ter­mi­nal speeds.

It was an announce­ment for an announce­ment. The iPhone3G isn’t com­ing for another month. iPhone 2.0 firmware, another month. App Store, another month.

This chal­lenge of tim­ing is non-trivial, and most likely not an acci­dent either. From the lay per­spec­tive, the mar­ket expected a punch­line to this long-running joke; a release to the flood of expec­ta­tion. What was announced yes­ter­day under­de­liv­ered on those counts.

First, the next-gen phone is less than the mar­ket expected. Yes, we knew it was going to be 3G. Yes, we knew it would have GPS. Yes, we knew it would cost less. But Apple has a his­tory of deliv­er­ing so much more than expec­ta­tion, of blow­ing away the mar­ket with things no one has thought of yet. The iPhone 3G sat­is­fies the mar­ket. It does not blow it away. Where is the for­ward fac­ing cam­era for hand­set video con­fer­enc­ing, for exam­ple? How did that rumor get so out of con­trol? Where is the 32 GB model? 16 GB has been around a while in the iPhone, after all.

Sec­ond, the App Store. The keynote lan­guished on and on and on with demos of soft­ware we’d seen, tools that devel­op­ers had been dis­cussing for months. Screen­shots had been leaked. Apps are already run­ning on mil­lions of hacked phones. And we had to suf­fer through nearly an hour of old news from a plat­form stage archi­tected to deliver WOW. There was no wow. (To be com­pletely fair, the gam­ing apps are amaz­ing. You should take a look at the keynote just to see what’s com­ing — cell phone man­u­fac­tur­ers have been try­ing to reach this level of qual­ity for a long, long time).

Third, OS X. The next ver­sion of OS X, 10.6, will be called Snow Leop­ard, and it’s likely the most inter­est­ing of the big WWDC 2008 sto­ries so far. The news? No new features.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leop­ard: Hid­den Gem

Which, of course, is not true at all. Accord­ing to Jobs, it’s an oppor­tu­nity for Apple to take a step back, to focus on effi­ciency and secu­rity, and to build in some core evo­lu­tion to the OS, while keep­ing on a one-release-per-year sched­ule. It’s a truly inter­est­ing strat­egy, actu­ally, and bucks a pretty well accepted gestalt that for pub­lic con­sump­tion, there must be eye-candy. Apple is bet­ting they can change the course of things with Snow Leopard.

And actu­ally, they’re in a great posi­tion to do it. Look at Vista, for exam­ple. Microsoft took five years to build XP’s suc­ces­sor and where the OS has received it’s great­est crit­i­cism is in usabil­ity. The rea­son for the so-called XP Down­grade Pro­gram is because the com­pany has put so much effort into mak­ing XP actu­ally func­tion over the years that it does meet user expec­ta­tion at this point. If you go back in time 6–7 years, you can see Microsoft faced with the same ques­tion of direc­tion in OS devel­op­ment that Apple took a stand on yesterday.

1. Focus work on XP and deliver core refine­ments that make the OS bet­ter, more sta­ble, more expand­able, more coop­er­a­tive with more hard­ware, and increase per­for­mance and secu­rity… OR





2. Do every­thing in option 1, plus take sev­eral years to re-jigger the inter­face and add a bunch of eye-candy to the mix, com­pletely chang­ing the way users inter­act tac­tilely and visu­ally with the OS, because then we’ll actu­ally have some­thing to talk about.

Vista, as it turns out, is the result of choos­ing option 2.

Leop­ard, on the other hand, is both widely accepted as struc­turally excel­lent, and func­tion­ally ele­gant. Users like to use it. They aren’t actu­ally scream­ing for new fea­tures. They’re con­tent with let­ting Apple define what it is they need to be excited about. Exposé. Dash­board. Bells. Whis­tles. What­ever. Apple is bank­ing that they can cash in on this wide-eyed enthu­si­asm for the OS and take a break from deliv­er­ing the bells and whis­tles, breathe deep and focus on build­ing some­thing truly next gen for the Mac platform.

While they’re at it, they’ll do some­thing really spe­cial: they’ll get the con­sumer pub­lic excited about core OS tech­nol­ogy. 64-bit. Multi-threading. Mul­ti­core. OpenCL. Javascript. They’ll have peo­ple using these terms, dri­ving dis­cus­sion they don’t really under­stand, and set­ting an expec­ta­tion around OS excel­lence in a way that oth­ers will have to emu­late to address. Again.

Apple has a recent his­tory of defin­ing a mar­ket dia­log. Yes­ter­day, they did it again. The keynote may have been a snoozer, but the hid­den gems are spe­cial. In the com­ing months, watch how the com­pany frames their dis­cus­sion on core tech­nol­ogy. Watch how they make it spe­cial, inter­est­ing, com­pelling for all-comers.

For the record, I’ll be buy­ing a new iPhone. I don’t care about the 3G. I don’t really care about the GPS — the cur­rent sys­tem actu­ally works quite well for me. I need the mem­ory. And my wife needs an iPhone of her own. When Jobs made the announce­ment for the first iPhone, he said they’d tar­geted 10 Mil­lion phones by the end of 2008. Given the announce­ments yes­ter­day, I don’t think 10 mil­lion is even in the cards — they’ll top 10 mil­lion before 10/1/08.