iTeam: WWDC 2009 Day One

Developer droves. They waited in a pilgrimage style caravan spanning six San Franciscan blocks around Moscone West, and when the dust cleared on the grounds Robostev… errr Phil Schiller took the stage as expected.

After a brief run in with the “hi I’m a mac / I’m a PC” crew”, Schiller ran through some usage statistics regarding the expansion of the Mac user base focusing on the effect caused by the release of the iPhone (from 25 mil to 75 mil users in two years). Proceeding, he ran through a full refresh of the Macbook Line including: expanded battery life, firewire 800, a port swap removing Express Card on everything but the 17″, the eCard replacement being the addition of an SD card slot on the 13″ and 15″ models. There was also a refresh of the Air that went under the radar, involving a speed gain and a price drop.

Next up the software side of the deal. For me, this was the area of greatest worry, because the possibility of infinitely rehashing prior announcements at length (e.g. Snow Leopard, iPhone OS 3.0). While this did prove true, there was still much technological tastemaking to be had. As expected, iPhone OS 3.0 Beta features were rehashed, reconfirming all added functionality with no unexpected retractions (ahem, which would never happen….). There were also quite a few notable additions. In no particular order: an autofill forms function which will provide “remember my information” functionality in mobile safari (for login forms / personal info / etc), Tethering between iPhones and Macbooks (awesome, but a little light on the provider details), and MobileMe gained remote iPhone data wipe support for lost or stolen phones, as well as the ability to locate phones in a browser map and push an alarm to it (even if the phone is silenced), cool stuff. As for the Snow Leopard details, much of the same regarding Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, the highlights being Quicktime X adding in-application video trimming and Dock Exposé integration for displaying items only pertaining to specific apps, and of course the $29 Snow Leopard cost was huge.

Towards the end of the keynote the primal hardware oriented side of me, fueled by rumors and unsated by a notebook refresh, raged for the confirmation of a new iPhone. Phil Shiller thankfully took the stage amidst my preparations for Hari-Kari and delivered on many of the predictions churning in the online rumor mills. The iPhone 3GS ad rolled briefly, quick and to the point: It looks the same with new guts. So what do we get? Well the S in the moniker stands for speed, that speed coming from a new ARM processor providing, on average, a speed doubling across the entire interface. A digital compass adds yet another sensor allowing for direction enhanced mapping applications as well as providing another general information source for fine grained motion feedback. A new autofocus 3MP camera that finally supports videos (which can be edited in-phone) Touch area focus for those rack focal fans out there. Voice commands that reach across phone functionality without switching state, powerful stuff. Pricing being $199/$299 for 16/32 GB respectively. Finally, Phil made good on a budget version with an 8 GB iPhone 3G for $99, definitely market expanding.

Something that I feel went under the radar was the 3rd party hardware custom protocol support. While 3rd party hardware played a slight roll in the demos, this has the potential to expand into an infinite number of markets. I can finally make that remote controlled potato harquebus a reality!

Enterprise features certainly had their day with Apple reaffirming its commitment to Exchange support in Snow Leopard, its integration spanning across the Mail, iCal and Address Book applications. iPhone wise, the 3GS will provide for full hardware encryption across the entire phone contents, further ensuring the security of lost or stolen iPhones awaiting relocation or remote wipe. Other enterprise features of note included VPN on demand which will provide simplified VPN access by way of auto-configured certificates. A Captive network isolation feature allowing for hotspot connection without interrupting browser state by isolating hotspot login pages from the browser / system state. A service known as Wispr promises to re-enforce captive network isolation in a way similar to a wireless hotspot keychain, silently providing access to captive networks without interrupting the user with a login page. Finally, the Bonjour sleep proxy provides wake-on solutions for remote iTunes / File / Printer access by using an airport extreme as a device aggregator capable of waking devices based on their addresses.

As Apple moves further into the enterprise, we patiently await more aggressive hardware support plans to provide real backing to it’s ever expanding claims of presence in the enterprise space.

More to come on iCMIS progress and session details as WWDC continues…