Apple WWDC 2010 Recap: Disappointment Sets In

Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference went off (nearly) without a hitch June 7, and there’s sadly, not much new news to report. Thanks to Gizmodo and the new iPhone leak, this blogger thinks all the surprise and pizzaz has fizzled. Here’s the quick rundown anyway featuring a few highlights and observations.

If you were wondering, “Did Nine Lives Media ship Dave off to California?” the answer is ‘no.’ But I felt like I was there since I had three browser windows going all at once.  MacRumors.com had a live blog, Gizmodo.com aggregated a few other live blogs, and Twit.tv featured a live audio feed. So that being said, here’s the whole picture I got coming across cyberspace.

First off, the obvious. Everything you saw in the leaked iPhone that Gizmodo got a hold of is true. iPhone 4 has the following:

A few little surprises?  Confirmation that there was indeed going to be a white iteration of this phone, but now both the front back are white. The bigger surprises were that iPhone OS 4 is now being called iOS 4, since the OS crosses so many devices now (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch). It is in fact using Apple’s new A4 chip see in the iPad, too. iBooks has PDF support and everything you already knew about iPhone OS 4 (er, iOS 4) from the previous conference was just magnified and gone over in more detail.

There wasn’t much talk about the iPad, but the day did start off with a few iPad status updates, noting that over 2 million iPads have been sold and that Apple is currently selling an iPad every 3 seconds.

Worth noting: A few weeks ago while I watched Google’s I/O conference, I was amused by all the mishaps Google ran into with live demos using Bluetooth and Wifi. I figured if that was an Apple event, there wouldn’t be a single hitch. Yet, even with all of Apple’s planning and precision, it couldn’t stop Wifi clutter from happening. Steve Jobs explicitly asked if live bloggers and the rest of the audience could shut down their Wifi devices — not because Jobs’ was using the same Wifi, but because all of the simultaneous Wifi signals floating around were actually causing interference. Digital noise, if you will.

But here’s the thing: Steve Jobs told me I wasn’t going to be disappointed. And I was. The entire WWDC focused on iPhone OS only. It was essentially the iPhone release party. There wasn’t anything related to AppleTV, to Mac OS X or to anything outside of iPhone, including iPods. What gives? Where’s Apple’s version of all the cool stuff Goolge is doing?

Maybe Apple will have a few more surprises up their sleeve later in the year (they usually have some sort of announcement in the Fall) but I hope Apple hasn’t stopped focusing on what made them a success in the first place. Computers built with design and purpose and an operating system second to none.

At least, that’s my two cents.

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