Core Strength

In the months, weeks and days leading up to WWDC this year, all of the talk was on the iPhone. We’d heard that it would be both thicker and thinner. We’d heard about 3G. We’d heard about GPS.

We’d hoped for a better camera. We’d hoped for video. We’d hoped for a front-mounted camera to support video conferencing.

Then, much more recently, we began to hear about this new OSX 10.6, dubbed Snow Leopard. Interesting choice of names since we’re already using Leopard.

However, now that we’ve attended, read the play by play, and/or watched the keynote stream, one thing became apparent about Apple. They know they’ve got a series of winners on their hands and their goal this year is to make them stronger. This isn’t new news. Apple has always known (or felt deep down inside) that they were developing great products and the platforms to use them on. If they didn’t feel that way, we wouldn’t be using the iPhone and OSX. We, the Mac community has also felt this way, for if we didn’t we wouldn’t be the maniacs we are.

But what yesterday’s keynote said to me is that Apple is taking a break from feature development and putting resources into really, truly strengthening these core products. And this, in my opinion, is a great thing.

From the descriptions and tech specs, the things that didn’t make it into the iPhone were the new features people wanted. More of the cool factor. Granted, if the iPhone 3G sported the front-facing camera and video chat, it would’ve sold ten million on July 11. But again, that’s not really the goal this time around.

No, this time the idea is to make everything better, not necessarily cooler. iPhone Edge (vs 3G) is an amzing product and platform. I’m writing this post on it while it plays Jane’s Addiction to me as I commute to work (using just 2 features). It’s got enough cool factor to carry into its 3G successor. But it’s slow, it doesn’t do GPS (not that I really need it to), and when it first debuted almost a year ago, it was small (although the capacity did increase in February).

Only a few key things changed and those are the pieces that need to be in place before new cool features can be implemented in next year’s iPhone.

From what I’ve seen of OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard thus far, it’s more of the same story. OS X has plenty of features, probably more than the average user knows what to do with. What it needs now is a good kick in the butt to straighten up its act and get more into shape. And that’s exactly what Apple’s been doing for the last six to twelve months or so.

Now if only I had a team of engineers getting ME into shape!

• Written on June 11, 2008
• Filed under Apple