I’ve never owned a TV, iPod, or Cell Phone and have no intention to begin. My reaction to the keynote was a bit different, standing on the sidelines in the no-technolust zone. It wasn’t ho-hum for I thought the two primary products are winners and will keep Apple extremely healthy. As a Mac user that is good news. However I thought a small change, briefly mentioned, the name change of Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc., has greater significance than generally acknowleged, perhaps because it is blindingly obvious from the direction in which Apple is growing. This wasn’t MacWorld at all, it was the first AppleWorld. Apple is no longer a computer manufacturer but a digital appliance creator and manufacturer with a Mac division. That is a huge sea change IMHO.
I am totally awestruck by the iPhone… and I want one… now! Imagine! Syncing with your Mac will nowreallywork. What a novel idea. I recently bought a BlackBerry and actually got it to sync once or twice. I have been resigned to giving using it as a smartphone and continue to use it as a very good phone. But now… well, it’s a real pain to contemplate switching providers. I currently use T-Mobile, and if I could get an unlocked version to work with my current SIM card/provider, I’d be first in line. Were the iPhone not so awesome, I wouldn’t give switching providers a second thought. Now, however, I’m in a quandry.
And now that you’ve seen the iPhone, you know what’s in store for the iPod. Can we call it a Zune killer? You bet!
I was pretty pleased with the keynote announcements even if the more traditional products were absent. It’s better to space out the releases than blow it all on Macworld. That would be premature Maculation. I have even more reason to laugh at the Zune!
Didn’t the release of the 24 inch iMac fill in the gap between the iMac and the Mac Pro? That gap is getting smaller and smaller. I don’t know if another product in between would be viable. It seems like it would take market share from both by cannabalism.
The phone is great and I am a cingular customer… so I may talk and see if I can re up my contract and upgrade sooner than the 1.5 years..... BUT…
Do you think the early adopters will get burned this time by the iphone?
- no cover leads to scratches, leads to the touch screen not working as well
- outside one may not be able to see the screen
- battery life, battery life, battery life…
- sync’g to the mac.... seamless? easy?
- security....
- is it flash or a HD?
- how big a drop can it take?
Anyway..... time will tell, should be interesting - this is new territory for apple (although I am a Newton user.....hey?! wonder if they will upgrade my Newton for an iphone....)
The iPhone floors me. No doubt this is great but, after just checking Cingular’s coverage area, I’ll be denied the chance to own one. This just plain sucks. Bigger news for me at least would have been Apple’s announcement that most major providers get the iPhone. Instead we see Cingular and Apple locking folks like me out.
Also, so far I have not seen anyone else mention this but, why not upgrade the video iPods to the screen we see on the iPhone? I was expecting that to be announced after the iPhone was demo’d. I also noted the Beatles tease. I suspect we’ll see video iPods to incorporate the video and controls we saw the iPhone use today? I hope so.
The iTV? Yawn. Really.
While I understand Apple’s excitement over the iPhone, I suspect a lot of folks groaned over the fact that they can’t get Cingular so....no iPhone for you rural people. They could have appeased us a bit with an iPod that had the iPhone’s features at the very least.
I thought the keynote was spectacular. And I was just following the live coverage (on 4 different web sites). I can’t imagine what it was like in person. Only I sort of can…
The coverage here was unique and great. It really gave me a feeling that I was there, complete with the reactions to the keynote, not just the data we’ll see in a press release shortly thereafter. I was thinking the same things about the possible price of the iPhone and how deep I was going to have to dig into my 401(k) to get one. It was way cheaper than expected and they had the good sense not to offer it for sale for 5 months.
Anyway, the keynote was only 2 hours. The rumor mills were filled with enough new stuff to fill 20 hours. I’m glad he focused on the breakthrough technology. Remember that in the old days, the 2 MacWorlds (Kate Mac is probably way too young to remember MacWorld Boston, but I attended several when I lived in New Haven, CT.) were the sole venues for product announcements. Now they are sprinked throughout the year, with or without press events, depending on how important Apple thinks it is.
I’m still looking forward to the vast majority of the rumors to come true, either with subsequent annoucements this week, or at bigger events in the next couple months.
I couldn’t be giddier than I am right now. I don’t even need to drink the Kool-Aid.
I was pretty pleased with the keynote announcements. But at first I thought that Steve would annonce a new line of lowend macbooks. They may come up later maybe with the leopard release…
I followed the keynote on Mac360 (by the way thank you to Bambi &Kate;) it was incredible and the server was very busy. I cannot imagine what it was like in person.
Apple (that it new name) is surffing on the wave of sucess…
Bepopredux, they will come out with iPods in the same form factor. I believe it’s a given. The memory is flash, not HD, and you can bet the farm on the memory to increase in size over time. I suspect there will be a whole new industry created around accessories, and I feel Apple would have created a better finish for this product so that it won’t scratch so easil. I think they’ve learned their lesson. Besides the peripheral industry, just imagine the software that will be created for this device!
I was so dumbstruck by what I saw on Apple’s website yesterday, that my wife and I watched the keynote with dinner and wine. She, not being a geeky individual, was thoroughly impressed. We have decided that we deserve a pair of these baby’s. I’ll keep the rest of the family on T-Mobile, but the two of us are jumping ship! I can’t recall seeing a more impressive gadget in my entire life, save when I went to the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and saw glimpses of what they envisioned the 21st century would be like. Alas, that was imaginary and this is real.
I was so dumbstruck by what I saw on Apple’s website yesterday, that my wife and I watched the keynote with dinner and wine.
I watched the QuickTime movie last night with Bambi when we returned to Las Vegas. You remember Vegas, right? Consumer Electronics Show. Bill Gates Keynote. Out here, everyone’s talking about the iPhone. Go figure.
The only difference between watching the keynote live and watching the keynote on a Mac is the audience reaction, which we could see all around us. People were stunned, and these are hard-core Mac users with experience dealing with Steve’s Reality Distortion Field.
The phone is remarkable. The only negative we heard was that it needs a hard drive and a lower price tag. When the iPods first came out back in late 2001, everyone said it needed a larger hard drive (but was smaller than the iPhone’s flash memory), and a lower price tag.
The iPhone floors me. No doubt this is great but, after just checking Cingular’s coverage area, I’ll be denied the chance to own one. This just plain sucks. Bigger news for me at least would have been Apple’s announcement that most major providers get the iPhone. Instead we see Cingular and Apple locking folks like me out.
I was at Macworld but didn’t see the keynote. The line was frackin’ huge!! Lots of people talked about the Cingular deal and were not happy about it. If a 2 year contract is involved, then it’s likely that Cingular is subsidizing the phone a bit to keep the cost down and margins up.
Also, so far I have not seen anyone else mention this but, why not upgrade the video iPods to the screen we see on the iPhone? I was expecting that to be announced after the iPhone was demo’d. I also noted the Beatles tease. I suspect we’ll see video iPods to incorporate the video and controls we saw the iPhone use today? I hope so.
The Apple people I talked with at the booth wouldn’t actually say it, but that screen is likely to show up in future iPods, but not until the iPhone is well entrenched and selling like hot cakes.
BTW - literally everyone I talked with yesterday said they’d buy the iPhone. Price, Cingular, no hard drive, no details-- they’d still buy it. Me too.
AppleTV was a hit but most conversations I had with people were the same-- Great. Where’s the DVR capability?
BTW #2 - I saw Bambi and Kate coming out of the keynote presentation. Outside in a line is as close as most of us could get. Bambi is tall. I’d say at least 6 feet. Much taller than Kate.
I can’t wait for that lovely touchscreen interface and scrolling feature to land inside the gen iMac.
It’s going to happen . You’ll see.
That just might be waht it takes to switch my windows using sister over.
She has limited use of one hand and won’t use the G4 Powermac that I gave her because her windows only touch-pad won’t work with it and she hates the mouse.
I think we’ll see a Leopard/iApps extravaganza in early March. What a start to 2007! This really does feel like a special year for Apple with the Intel transition behind us. It’s a truly exciting time don’t you think?
Can you say 20% market share? This will further reinforce Apple’s committment to innovation and present further reasons to purchase Apple products (Mac, in particular). Imagine, the iPhone runs OS X. The iPhone will find itself as the impetus for another halo effect, the only downside being the “exclusive agreement” with Cingular. As they are planning on exporting to Europe and Asia in the years to come, this may not be an issue to worry about. I’m willing to pay a premium for an unlocked version.
Oh, and I think 20% is reasonable, enough to no longer be treated as second-class citizens by the Windoze-only pundits. Much more than that and the Mac’s mystique will suffer.
A lot of the pieces really start falling together when you look at Widgets and Dashcode as facilitating the mobile Mac platform (aka iPhone) and not just something devleoped for the desktop-
So many products could/should/hopefully will spill out from what we saw yesterday- widescreen iPods, a REAL ultraslim tablet Mac, new UI directions for the conventional desktop, etc.
Would really have liked to see some of the “conventional” stuff had it been ready, like our accustomed iLife/iWork updates, maybe some MacPro revamps (am I the only consumer user stuck on PowerMac/MacPro as a personal PC? To me, the iMac is the appliance- have one as a music server, but it’s just not configurable enough to be a “PC"). Xtreme Airport is cool, but with DSL instead of cable I can’t think of a use for it’s bandwidth.
Displays? How about the Apple eye for detail and color balance applied to come consumer HDTV displays with built in iSight? Something like a Westinhouse 37 or 42”, only Apple-ized.
Good thing they aren’t turning out everything I’d like as fast as I’d like, or I would be in the poorhouse.
Oh, and since I bought my personnel Blackberry outright, as soon as the iPhone is out, it goes back in the box and on eBay. Man, is there ever going to be some pent up demand for those by the time it’s released!
