If there’s a take-home theme to Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, it’s this: Apple wants you to have a continuous and contiguous computing experience from your Mac to your iPhone or iPad. Maps and iBooks come to the Mac, iOS notifications come to the Mac, and iCloud becomes even more of a shared linchpin holding it all together. This is a low-key use of the kind of web services Apple has always struggled with – hopefully lightweight enough that it will be reliable, or at least more reliable than some of the iCloud stuff has been in the past. (Aside: the iDisk was basically DropBox ten years before DropBox, so I’m not sure why it went away or why people thought Apple needed to buy DropBox.)
After the last week, too, I wonder how many people will want to have iCloud Keychain sharing all their passwords and credit card numbers. At the very least it’s something people need to think about. Rands nailed it: “I barely trust iCloud to keep my bookmarks.” He’s not the only one, either.
12 hour battery life on a 13″ MacBook Air? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY. At the very least, 9 hour battery life on an 11″ MacBook Air means I will almost certainly scale down to the 11″ next time out. And at long last, something they desperately needed to announce: a new Mac Pro. This thing has been so long coming that it has to be a blockbuster – and on present form, it looks like it could be. I mean, three simultaneous 4K displays on the built-in graphics? And the thing is built in the USA at that…
If there’s one mission for iCloud, it’s “suck less.” And iWork is alive – and apparently turning into its own web-based service as well. None of this document-sharing stuff from 2009 or so, real honest-to-god Pages and Numbers and Keynote on the web. Given the track record of Apple’s web services in general, this is not going to light a lot of lamps unless they have changed the way things work on the back end in a BIG way.
And now the much-awaited iOS material…and the Android influence is unmistakeable. The massively lightweight fonts that have taken over the mobile space have finally been adopted by Apple. And the look – lighter color, thin all round – is definitely unlike anything that existed on the platform before. If there’s an overarching theme to the new iOS, it’s “Piss on you, Scott Forstall” – there’s nothing remotely skeuomorphic here. And it looks like the true multitasking relies heavily on the same sort of battery life tricks in Mavericks. If it works, it will be amazing. If not…the phone will be a brick by lunchtime.
Meanwhile…iTunes Radio is real. What exactly are we aping here? Spotify? Pandora? Whatevs. Phone, FaceTime and Message blocking AT LAST. And activation lock that will prevent you wiping and reusing a phone. As theft deterrents go, this is pretty much all NYPD could realistically ask for.
A lot of people are going to be talking about Apple catching up to Android or Windows Phone or whatever else, and to some extent they’re right. But at the same time, the message on iOS has always been “we’re not going to do this until we can make it not suck.” It’s why there was no 3G or App Store in the beginning, it’s why cut-and-paste took until iOS 3, it’s why multitasking was such a limited function until now. But more than anything else, it means that everything this time out had better pay off.