There’s been much brouhaha – especially by the German media – about how disappointed everybody is about the iPhone 4S. No new look. Only better camera and better CPU. Ah and there’s this voice recognition which Android’s been having for years.
I beg to differ, massively. I am stoked, ecstatic about the iPhone 4S. Let me share my thoughts on why this move by Apple makes perfect sense and why not just iPhone newbies and 3GS owners will buy it.
Steve Jobs was never one to leave anything to chance. He even timed his own ascension to a higher plane to fall on the day after the 5th generation iPhone was publicly unveiled.
Mr. Jobs will be missed. The kind of biological problems that shortened his life span are no way to go for a tech god. If only medicine had developed at the same pace that he furthered the digital lifestyle, then I am sure we would have lived longer. But alas the working of miracles is still only the domain of iOS devices and Macs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook gathered a handful of select journalists into the so-called “Townhall” room at the Apple HQ in Cupertino. Interest in this event had reached a fever pitch with most of the world expecting a new iPhone to be launched, “iPhone 5”.
It so turns out that there WILL be a new iPhone, but as if to mock the pundits it is not called number 5, but 4s. But first – while everybody started getting nervous – Cook and team told us how well Apple is doing.
Let’s review the important announcements.
With the iOS 5 looming there are a couple of items that you will need to look at to have your apps ready for the public availability of iCloud and the OS. Let us review.
Much will be clearer to us on October 4th, but let us pause a moment and wildly speculate about what’s happening behind the scenes.
Amazon revealed their new touch-enabled Kindles as well as an Android-based 7″ tabled, called the “Fire”. Steve Jobs personally always poo-poo’ed the notion of anything smaller than the iPad form factor, the new device is generally seen to be a frontend to the “Amazon Cloud”, that is the heaven Amazon.com will be in when users let themselves be locked into the Amazon ecosystem versus the iTunes one.
UPDATE: The release date has been bumped by one month! October 24th.
There have been many attempts at chronicling the life of Mr. Steve Jobs the person who once founded and once saved our favorite company. Now the wait is almost over for the book that tells it all … or so we hope. On November 21st the official biography will be “launched”, a must-buy for every true Apple fan.
The first and so far only true glimpse into Steve’s history you might have gotten from his famous Stanford Commencement Address. Being adopted under the condition that he attended college, only to drop out soon thereafter but sticking around to attend calligraphy classes. Of the two Steves he always was more the business minded, we are on tenterhooks to now learn how he really ticks.
One cannot but wonder if this Biography was not as carefully architected as Steve’s exit from the Apple limelight. Soon we will know.
When I listened to the latest episode of The Talkshow during my morning walk something clicked. All the puzzle pieces that pundits, blogs and myself had been commenting on individually suddenly started to come together. The result is a vision, probably similar to how Holy Mary might have felt when the archangel told her about her next “one more thing”.
I really mean the title literally, there will never be a device – not in October, not in 2012, not ever – called “iPhone 5” that you will be able to purchase. Somebody who kept pestering his “contacts” at Apple about “when does the next iPhone come out” reaped this remark “Next iPhone? There will never be a next iPhone. There can never be an iPhone better than the iPhone 4”.
Of course there will be a device to purchase , something that has all the features of iPhone 4 and possibly many more, it just won’t be CALLED “iPhone 5”. Here’s why.
Some of the media called it the end of an era when Steve Jobs quit his job as Apple’s CEO. But contrary to the first taste such a statement might leave in your mouth it not at all means that Steve is leaving Apple.
In his open letter he was clear that he still wants to play an important role, but just not on the stressful position of Chief Executive Officer. He’s doing what he should have done all along, but Apple was too much afraid of the negative impact that this might have on the stock price.
So this set of announcements had to wait until a potentially very strong financial quarter – Apple is said to release new hardware this quarter that will positively impact their bottom line. Also, they waited until having more or less become the most valuable company on earth with only Exxon Mobile to rival their market cap. Finally the news releases where made outside of regular trading hours, which again shows that Apple tries to avoid a panic on the stock market.
Apple sends a clear message to us developers: “Stop supporting 3.x”. They say that most loudly by omitting Simulator 3.2 from Xcode 4.1 which I painfully noticed when I wanted to debug a 3.2 bug in a component of mine. I had updated everything to Lion and installed Xcode 4.1 because that’s the first version supporting Lion.
So if you are basing your operations on the most current “stable” versions of the OS and Xcode then you cannot support 3.2 without jumping through some extra hoops. So I did some research to find if anybody is actually still using 3.2. Unfortunately Apple forbids ad networks from collecting and publishing device data because that would also show us info about future iOS devices.
So what is the trend and current status? Read on.
Apple had their quarterly earnings conference call yesterday, here are the highlights:
License:
