The WWDC keynote is finally over. Much of the news was leaked earlier on various blogs, but Apple is making things tough for the competition. It is wringing-out the obsolescence curve aggressively. With the current iPhone 3G re-priced to $99 (albeit with a new contract), competing phones are going to have to be A LOT better, not just a little better. So potential switchers have to weigh 3GS vs Pre (or something else), while new accounts now stare a much cheaper 3G in the face. And competitors haven’t really shown themselves capable of leaping ahead, in terms of ease-of-use or feature set. The Palm Pre comes closest, but a $99 iPhone is definitely going to take some wind out of its sails. People grumble about AT&T, but I don’t think it’s bad enough to foment any significant backlash (UPDATE: here’s an alternative view via TechCrunch; Gizmodo disagrees). Full Microsoft Exchange support and consumer remote iPhone wiping are nice touches as well.
Enough about the iPhone, though (are all the demos really necessary, Apple?). I’m more excited about the 64-bit changes, parallel processing with Grand Central, and OpenCL. If these features live up to the hype over the next couple of years, the effective power of the home computer is about to take a nice step forward. Microsoft is fighting on multiple fronts (Bing, Live Mesh anyone?) and seems to have lost the initiative (Windows 7 looks a lot better, but I can’t see it as anything but a major Vista bug-fix). I wonder whether the chip manufacturers are capable or even interested in creating developer-friendly solutions for parallel processing and generalized graphic card computing. Apple still looks strong to me.
MoreNotesToSelf 