Apple Stuff

So Apple had their big event yesterday. All of it seemed pretty reasonable though a bit unexciting.

The iPad updates were expected. The mini got retina and the big one is now an Air (basically a larger version of the mini form factor) with the guts of an iPhone 5S. Though neither got the finger printer scanner. So we know what's going into the next version next year. I'm hoping that now that there's an iPad Mini and an iPad Air, we'll get an iPad Pro in 2014 to match the Mac naming conventions.

The MacBook Pro changes were also just the expected spec upgrades. Fair enough. They're nice machines. My sister will probably upgrade to the 15" MacBook Pro because she wants a 15" screen. A 15" Air would be fine for her but Apple apparently doesn't' want to go there. Also, since the MBP isn't in any way user expandable and she's had her current one for over 5 years, it seems like the right plan to get the $300 upgrade for a 512GB SSD.

The Mac Pro is still nice, just as it was when they announced at WWDC. A starting price of $3K is lower than I expected but we still don't know what the options cost.

Nice to see updates to iWork (it's been 4 years) though I hope they're not dumbed down and that the sync to iOS versions works perfectly as they say. (I've had some issues with custom display formats which iOS doesn't support but that's mostly it). I see the new versions don't support AppleScript and that's pissed some people off, but I didn't even know the old versions did.

Mavericks being free is also nice though I suspect it was a lot of work for accountants to figure out how to do that (for profit public companies don't usually do a lot of work to give it away for free). Remember the early iOS updates were free on iPhone (which charged a monthly fee for phone service so it counted as a revenue stream) but cost some money on iPod Touch (which had no monthly charge).

I'm installing iOS 7.0.3 now but I'll wait a little for Mavericks to see if there are any issues. Quicken will supposedly work fine and Quicksilver 1.1.2. will probably too. This is a bit distressing, Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation. I'l definitely wait for that to settle out. Hiding the All Mail folder was really useful when using iPhones to prevent them from using a ton of data bandwidth.

For now I don't think I have to buy anything. :) Replacing my iPad 2 with an iPad Air is kinda appealing (lighter, retina, siri, faster), but maybe not compelling enough right now. I'm more interested in an Apple TV update.