Today there was no reality distortion field. Just a reality field. You want video. Here it is. You want devs to have video. Here it is. You want to edit video in place without loading Quicktime Pro or even knowing what it is. Here it is. You want the video menu and nav tools to disapper. They’re gone. You want them back. Here they are.
You want a way to find your iPhone if you put it on silent to turn off all the noise and then your cat pushed it into the cracks of the sofa. Buy MobileMe, go to the page, look at the map, click ring and it overrides silent. Never had reason one to get MobileMe, but this Marriage Saver option is definitely almost worth a hundred bucks a year. If one developer bootstraps MobileMe for some value and I download that app, I’m almost in. And you can sell it to your wife as a way of checking where you are.
Oh, you like the Pre. Here’s the 3G for 99 bucks. Thanks for the three days, Palm. And how about the G2 having no headphone jack. Apple doesn’t even have to win with this kind of competition. Seriously, who is the guy at Google who didn’t step up and flag that at the meeting? But guess what, Apple is winning anyway. The biggest laugh the whole morning was what wasn’t said, when Phil Schiller announced tethering on 22 carrier partners in 42 countries. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, didn’t even have to say no AT&T. Big laugh.
Apple has the carriers on the run. You can see the vise tightening as AT&T gets closer to the reup time on the exclusive deal. With Pre and G2 already out there, it won’t take long for them to almost catch up on other carriers, and then… oh how about 99 bucks for a 3G with 1 billion Appstore downloads. Who’s kidding who here. Hell, Apple has the browsers on the run too. HTML 5, 2X to 3X the speed in Safari, HTTP audio and video streaming. I think I saw RSS on the screen in the upper row third from the left of 1000 features.
Peer to peer auto-find no peering over bluetooth. The kids playing p2p backgammon in the back seat. TomTom GPS car kit with big speaker and look-ahead video preview. Honk your horn and unlock the car with ZipCar. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg, our universal remote control with new features and updates literally streaming down in realtime.
As we sat there, it seemed so the new normal, not frenzied but almost Spockian logical: the new phone, the 1000 APIs, the Snow Leopard fit and finish, the MacBook Air for $1499 and 700 off the SSD price. The 7-hour lithium polymer batteries with a thousand recharges, well past the MacBook Pro lifetime. And the OS upgrade price 29 bucks, 49 family pack. A stream of inevitability, conquering the airplane, the car, the kids, the media, even our understanding of what constitutes the technology platform.
Suddenly, the shape of things to come is the shape of what’s here now. The iPhone is the client, the MacBook (they’re all Pro) the server, and you can bring it into the office and plug into the corporate Exchange server with one click. Never has the fear of Apple holding developers or users hostage been so overstated. Apple’s rigorous march forward and its deep understanding of what the market will want next is not only keeping them ahead of the competition but building the markets they will own tomorrow. They’re like Willie Mays and the basket catch, making the hard stuff look easy. The market may have bounced down a bit on the Jobs no-show, but Steve and company — and the smiling developers — know better.