Apple Announces new iPhone

Apple had its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) yesterday. Its first in sometime without Steve Jobs running the show. It was as pretentious as ever, however, and would have made their maestro proud. As usual with Apple announcements, they were of no particular consequence but were presented in typical Apply fashion with plenty of flare, inflated statistics, and general hyperbole.

The big announcement was a new iPhone, the "3G S", which will ship later this month. It has the same form factor as the previous iPhone but stated as being "twice as fast"...whatever that means. It will also support a new faster network, a better camera (w/ Video), and some other software features that won't be available to current iPhone owners. A rather nice improvement overall given the confines of the form factor.

You can see the Apple official release here with pricing. Keep in mind that the $199/$299 pricing models they offer are for new customers only. For those of you existing iPhone 3G users??? Well, much like the original iPhone owners when the 3G was released, you get the shorter (and much more expensive) end of the stick. You an expect to pay $500-600 for the upgrade, thanks to the subsidization model used by wireless carriers.

One caveat on the faster network...AT&T (the exclusive US carrier for the iPhone) will not begin rolling out this new faster network until late this year.

Also, they announced a software upgrade for the iPhone, called appropriately iPhone Software Update 3.0. This update is free to all iPhone owners, but will cost $10 for owners of the iPod Touch. This is a minor release with some improvements on some core apps, cut/paste support, and new full support for MMS messaging (which has been a long time coming honestly). Once again, however, AT&T is there to pee on the parade because it doesn't support two of the key features: US Customers cannot tether their phones to their PC and cannot use MMS Messaging. That isn't to say it won't be added later...but I am sure, as is the AT&T way, there will be an up-charge for it.

On the OS front, Apple now claims there are 35 million active Mac users. This is the first time in years that they have claimed more than 25 million Mac users. That's a big number...until you look at the number of Windows users...currently at roughly 1 billion (yep...with a "b"). That puts Mac at about a 3% market share. And that isn't even including Linux/Unix...which honestly isn't even really worth including, so I didn't.

Apple is planning to release a minor upgrade to Leopard, dubbed Snow Leopard (how cute), in September. By all accounts it looks, acts, and feels a lot like Windows 7, which is scheduled for release in late October. However, Windows 7 has often been compared to being "Mac-like", and so therefore this is really making it look more like, well, itself. Sounds more like a "Service Pack" type upgrade to me. Oh, and they're charging $29 for the "upgrade".

That last bit of "significant" news from the company was a new version of the Safari browser for both Mac and Windows. In a move somewhat Microsoft-like, the version that will be bundled with the upcoming "Snow Leopard" will have special features not available anywhere else (like crash protection). Hmm...ponderous. I would imagine the irony here is lost on most Apple folks.

In all, it was Apple simply being Apple. Condescending, self-congratulatory, with a few snippets of actual tech excitement. Nobody says more, without actually saying anything, than Apple.

...with yours truly possibly being the lone exception...and maybe the Federal Government.