On October 23, 2012, Apple held a special event to introduce their new Mac and iPad lineups. Unlike the previous month's iPhone 5 and iPod event, it wasn't bifurcated into effectively two different keynotes, nor was almost any time at all spent on software. Instead, one after another, product after product, spec updates, redesigns, and entirely new hardware was shown off on the California Theater stage. It was an unprecedented display of force projection. It was Apple firing everything. It was Tim Cook clearing his skies.
Yet at the same time, the pre-event hype seemed decidedly muted, at least compared to the iPhone 5 event in September. Was that simply because the iPhone remains the densest attentional gravity well in Apple's lineup? That the consistency and accuracy of rumors have begun to suppress the expectation of surprise? Or that two events in close proximity, even from Apple, simply can't maintain the intensity threshold of events better spaced out across the year?
The state of Apple
Apple's CEO traditionally comes out first to welcome the crowd and set the stage for the event that follows. That's Tim Cook's role. He gives the mission statement and the mission brief, and his status updates are filled with something all too rare in consumer electronics -- actual numbers. Not numbers of products shipped or hoped to be sold, or users of ancillary services co-opted into new services, or percentages of undefined markets in specific regions. Cook's numbers are of actual things sold to and used by actual users. And, as usual, they were impressive.
The iPhone 5 has sold 5 million units to date. The iPad line has sold 100,000,000 tablets to date. There are now 200,000,000 devices running iOS 6. 700,000 App Store apps, over a third of which are iPad apps or have iPad optimized interfaces. And more.
Those numbers would be especially meaningful later in the vent.
iBooks 3 and iBooks Author
Buried among the numbers at yesterday's iPad and Mac event, Tim Cook announced a new version of iBooks with a few new features. From the beginning I'd heard the iPad mini was about removing weight and cost as barriers of entry to iPad sales, and about taking the ebook fight to Amazon and, as Ryan Block of GDGT aptly terms them, their Kindle line of consumer content appliances. Yet the event came and went without Apple matching the Kindle on pricing, or challenging Amazon on ebooks. Why?
Apple could equal or eclipse the Kindle catalog through sheer force of deal-making, something they traditionally excel at. But platform diversity is something in which Apple has historically shown almost no interest. Apple did make iTunes for Windows, but they haven't made any iTunes apps for any other non-Apple devices. And because, unlike music, commercial ebooks are still bound by DRM (digital rights management), they can't be opened by generic ereaders either. Whether you buy Kindle books or iBooks, you're still locked into that format, though the Kindle cage is much, much bigger.
More content, in more places, on more devices, among other reasons, simply trumps whatever technical, interactive, and visual advantages iBooks has on iOS. Ultimately, the ability login, be it on a $69 Kindle or high end smartphone or tablet, have access to your entire ebook library, synced and ready to go, even in base text, is compelling, and is something Apple simply can't and won't match .
Given that, my expectation that Apple would make a direct run at Amazon in the ebook space was unrealistic. Given that, a broader focus on education at yesterday's event, which would have almost certainly required a broader focus on books and textbooks, was also unrealistic. The ongoing lack of iBooks for Mac is disappointing, but a new version of iBooks and a new version of iBooks Author, keeps Apple's foot in the door, provides an amazing experience for those for whom that matters more than anything Amazon's Kindle offers, and the focus on languages maintains Apple's dominance in international markets.
Here's the longer version:
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display
The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display wasn't a huge surprise. In addition to being widely rumored, it simply made the most sense for Apple to move Retina to the 13-inch. The iMacs are too big to cost effectively deploy Retina panels, and the MacBook Airs are too small to balance out battery life (for now).
Retina was given a very technical, very spec-heavy pitch. Apple had the word "nit" up on a slide. But Retina is something that needs to be explained. More pixels that are tinier pixels that ultimately make all pixels all but disappear needs to be explained. Star Trek terms makes Retina sound impressive, and since it's the main selling feature, it needs to sound impressive. So, specs.
The only troublesome aspect of the 13-inch was its lack of a discreet GPU, and since the 15-inch can max out its GPU, I just assumed Apple would add one to the 13-inch and do likewise. But not so. Apple stuck with Intel HD graphics. Maybe the slightly smaller panel size -- 2560x1600 versus 2880 by 1800 -- is enough to make the embedded graphics work. I'm not going to assume that, however. The 15-inch is already an edge case when you want to Expose multiple browser windows or drive large external displays. I also do a lot of Final Cut Pro X and Photoshop work, and the lack of quad-core, a 16GB option, and discreet graphics worries me for my particular use case. I do want to try it out, however.
Otherwise the 13-inch uses the same chassis design as the 15-inch that debuted at WWDC 2012, making it the lightest, thinnest MacBook Pro ever (a recurring theme for Apple if ever there was one).
The Mac mini
The Mac mini scored an update to the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors and USB 3 and the rest of its internals. Despite Samsung and Google having totally ripped off the current Mac mini design for the ChromeBox, Apple didn't do anything to evolve the look.
So the Mac mini remains what it was, only better -- a good choice for multi-platform developers, home theaters, and those who want a small OS X server.
The iMac
The new iMac wasn't a huge surprise either, though the degree to which Apple sharpened the edges was surprising. 5 mm. You could cut someone with that. To achieve it, Apple jettisoned the optical drive, just like the MacBook Air and Retina MacBook pro before it. That's an aggressive choice for a desktop machine that really doesn't benefit as much from thinness and lightness the way portables do, but Apple is also the company that killed the floppy.
The iMac also got all new, Ivy Bridge powered internals as well, along with Apple's Fusion Drive which intelligently manages an SSD and HDD as a single logical unit, allowing for fast boots, launches, and read/writes but also voluminous storage. But unlike the Mac mini, its design was iterated as well. Did Apple have to move the built-in optical drive to a peripheral, move the SD card slot to the rear, and otherwise sacrifice the convenience of a segment of their user-base for what looks on the surface to be simply less surface?
Of course not, but this is what Apple does. Because of the way they build devices -- designing the way to design them, manufacturing the way to manufacture them -- they exist in the relative future. And now that competitors have begun copying the iMac to embarrassing degrees, the way they copied the MacBook Air and Mac mini, Apple is moving the design bar even further out.
Now, when you walk into a big box retailer, if by chance Apple products aren't isolated in their own oasis-within-a-store, no clone will be mistaken for an iMac. At least not for a couple years again.
(Personally I'm waiting on the updated ThunderBolt Displays with laminated screens, but those are likely several months out as all the 27-inch panels will first go to satisfying iMac demand.)
iBooks Author
If Tim Cook introducing iBooks wasn't interesting enough, he also introduced an updated iBooks Author as part of the iPad overview. Apple held a special education event earlier in the year to announce textbooks for the iPad. Apple released iBooks Author so rich-media text books could be more easily generated. Tim Cook claimed at yesterday's event that 80% of the U.S. school core curriculum was now covered by iBooks textbooks, and that they're deployed at more than 2500 schools in the U.S. (Sadly, they're still not deployed to iPhone or iPod touch.)
The new version of iBooks Author includes vertical templates, embedded fonts, rendered mathematical formulae, multitouch widgets, and am easier, better process for updating books. International textbook support, of course, can vary wildly.
Again, it isn't overly aggressive, but it's realistic.
The iPad 4
Like the new iMac, the new iPad itself wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise, at least to me, was that Apple actually came out and called the revised iPad 3 the "4th generation iPad". I figured they'd play it like the Verizon iPhone, and use the expanded LTE footprint and Lightning adapter to "fix the antenna" that was the chipset. That was the whole advantage to calling it "the new iPad", right? Dropping the version numbers smooths the way for new versions at odd time spans. But with the jump from an Apple A5X to an Apple A6X, Apple was upfront enough to not only give the new iPad a new generation, but announce it as such. (And they didn't even play the iPad 3S card...)
Apple has typically stuck to 1 year cycles for iOS devices, besides the iPhone 4S and Apple TV 3 which took approximately 16 months and 18 months respectively, and the iPod touch 5 which took 24 months. Now the iPad 4 took only 7 months. In a world of with the Kindle HDs, Surfaces RT and Pro, Nexus 7 and impending Nexus 10, Apple isn't afraid to move faster either.
But the reaction was more curious than the device itself. When Apple waits, they aren't innovative and they're losing. When Apple moves aggressively, they're "screwing" users. But Apple doesn't really care about either sentiment. Not really. They care about making better products, which is what the iPad 4 is. And no one who has an iPad 4 has to buy it. Those for whom the iPad 3 was a poor compromise between screen density and performance, or for those whose LTE bands it simply didn't support, it'll be something finally worth buying or upgrading to.
The iPad mini
The iPad mini ended up being almost exactly what I expected. The big surprise for me here was the lack of an 8GB SKU for under $300. Either that SKU never existed or it was dumped. My guess is it was dumped. It seems like the original thinking was Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 would do better than they did, and that price pressure simply never materialized.
At $250 the iPad mini would have all but killed the small tablet market. At $329 there's a $200-$300 umbrella underneath it where other at-cost or content-subsidized tablets and appliances can breathe and get a foot in the door. Granted an 8GB iPad mini would have been a poor user experience, but it would have shut that door. Hard. (And gotten a lot of people into stores who may have then gone 16GB for $350 anyway.)
Instead, Phil Schiller spent some time comparing the iPad mini to the Nexus 7 (though without naming the Nexus 7). That seemed like Apple explaining why they deserved $80 more for the iPad mini than Google charges for a similar capacity tablet. In other words, bigger screen, better apps. It was an odd segment, and arguably they didn't need to make that case, but they chose to.
As to the device itself, the only truly new device Apple unveiled yesterday, Jim Dalrymple of The Loop had, among other things, this to say:
The iPad mini can easily be held with one hand for reading. Menus and other onscreen items can be reached with that hand if they are close. Of course, you can?t expect to be able to navigate the mini?s screen with one hand, but you can touch and scroll.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball's quick take included:
Screen resolution-wise, it?s exactly what I expected for a 163 PPI display in 2012: noticeably nicer than the 133 PPI iPad 1/2, noticeably worse than the 266 PPI iPad 3/4. The iPad Mini display seems brighter and to have better contrast than the iPhone 3GS display, but unsurprisingly, rendered text looks exactly like it does on the 3GS.
It's basically got the iPod touch 5 casing and internals with a miniaturized (Apple says "concentrated") iPad-style 4:3 screen at 7.9- rather than 4-inches. The iPad mini to iPod mini analogy was as spot on as the name. It's not for those who want a cheaper iPad. It's for those who want a more portable iPad, and are willing to make some compromises to get it.
But in addition to all the other iTunes content, it runs iPad apps, which neither the iPhone nor iPod touch can do. Tim Cook pointed out there's over 250,000 of those now, which makes competing tablet apps little more than a rounding error.
And that's what will likely make all the difference in the world.
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