It’s sexy, make no mistake. A 2880×1800 display on a 15″ laptop is earth-shattering, especially at that price point. It might be too big for my bag, though, and the step up from 3 to 4.5 pounds might make a difference with my shoulder issues, so we’ll have to see what’s doing. I’m not ordering anything for a couple of days, I promise you that.
The Mountain Lion and iOS 6 stuff is of a piece – basically different interfaces to an iCloud-connected world. The Maps changes were inevitable (cue Steve Jobs-Scarlett O’Hara clip) – sucks not to have transit directions anymore, but they weren’t that helpful and I was always using the Caltrain and VTA and BayTripper apps anyway. The Passbook app seems to be a better solution than Google Wallet for now – different, but not requiring NFC technology; if you can scan a barcode you can make use of Passbook. Moving to a Retina Display in iPhone 4 made that feasible. Siri improvements are necessary and predictable, esp. since it was a beta before – basically this is all about getting the original Siri features into the iOS built-in version.
A little disappointed but not surprised that iOS 6 isn’t coming to the original iPad, but that sort of drives home that 512 MB of RAM is the price to play on iOS 6. They say it’ll be on the 3GS, but I doubt the full feature set is there – and the A5 seems to be mandatory for Siri support, which is also not surprising. If the viable lifespan of an iPad is two years, though, it doesn’t speak volumes for its viability as a laptop replacement.
The most telling stat for me was that 80% of iOS devices are running iOS 5. Ice Cream Sandwich, which dropped one week later, is on less than 10% of Android devices. That one stat drives home why merely pointing at units shipped doesn’t persuade me that Android has in any way surpassed iOS, not when the bulk of those devices are running an 18-month-old base OS release. Hell, we’re coming up on a year since a point release. The number one disincentive for Ed Earl Brown to buy an Android phone is that he has no idea when – or even if – he’ll be able to update it. Whereas any iPhone you buy on a contract has always has updates to the OS, free, for the life of said contract. Not a stat that shows up on paste-eaters’ feature-comparison charts, but one that cannot be ignored.
So far, it looks like Apple will survive without Himself. Check back in a couple of years, though.