Steve Jobs renamed his company to Apple, Inc. Renamed the iTV to Apple TV and the iPod to iPhone. Well, not quite. However, the iPhone is an iPod with a new OS: a baby MacOS X and lots of connectivity. If you live in the US.
Apple’s first round of product announcements for 2007 at Macworld have been rumoured for many months – if not years. I think the build up has led to disappointment in the Mac-crowd.
The iPhone is available in June in North America, based on a 2 year exclusive with Cingular. Europe is slated for the end of 2007 and Asia for 2008. With the current shenanigans in Australia with Telstra’s new network and others scrambling – I am not asking for an iPhone for Christmas 2007. GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth etc. etc. are all in a nice package where the screen is a touchscreen. Apple have innovated on the UX with multi-finger gestures to make all the apps work in a small package. Looking at the online demos, as you would expect – Apple have gone a long way to correct the current staid phone user interfaces
The Apple TV seems like a nice idea: a media center with wireless and smart integration with the Macs on your local network. Seems a little late and me-too. Not 1080i, nor can it play HD/Blueray DVDs. Niftly little thing, but it doesn’t do enough quite yet.
In what was a strange keynote, there were no MacOS X (a good call since all that would occur are many Leopard vs. Vista comparisons), no new Macs (strange since Intel announced new Quad-core processors overnight) or no new software. The keynote should have been given at CES, not MacWorld!
My opinion is that Apple Inc, as it moves out of the wild-west of computers into the highly controlled world of telecommunications and television is going to have to learn the art of partnering quicker. It is not yet big enough to push its weight around to get its own way. But like the iPod/iTunes store franchise: this could all change within a very short time. Apple is late to the game with both these products, and has a long road ahead to be successful.