Daring Fireball’s John Gruber offers three “takeaways” from Apple’s WWDC keynote address on Monday. Apple CAN walk and chew gun at the same time, the new Retina display MacBook Pro is awesome (duh!), and Google should’ve allied with Apple in the mobile market instead of trying to compete.
On the software side, Apple has — dare I say finally — become a company that can walk and chew gum at the same time. Remember back in 2007 when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) was delayed six months because, Apple flat-out admitted, they had to pull engineering talent from Mac OS X to work on iOS 1 for the original iPhone?
He goes on to say that they don’t seems to have that problem any longer. Today Apple has two operating systems that are both being developed side-by-side, year-after-year. They run neck and neck in the race to see which one has the most improvement.
His second “takeaway”: “The new ‘next-generation’ MacBook Pro with Retina Display is, in short, ‘Back to the Mac’ for hardware.” Gruber says the new MacBook Pro is an iOS inspired appliance. Battery, RAM, solid state storage… All sealed in a magnificent storage. He is dazzled by the Retina Display, and much like it was when the first Retina Display iPhone was released, once you see that beautiful display, the old style displays look positively horrid.
He says the new 15-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro is the future of portable Macs.
Number three is the one I particularly like. Gruber offers the idea that starting with from the opening of the keynote, when Siri did “stand-up”, through the presentation of the new Maps, right into Siri’s new features, there was an unmistakable air of “Fu$% you, Google!” to the whole keynote. He closes with the sentence, “I’ve said it before and will say it again: Google made a mistake by deciding to oppose rather than ally with Apple on mobile.”