Apple news

I haven't posted anything about the upcoming Apple Watch, and hence, nothing about yesterday's press event that was sure to be the "coming out" party for the watch.  Basically, I had no intention of buying one, so, while I found some of the discussions about it interesting, I wasn't thinking about it on any kind of deep level.

Nevertheless, I watched much of yesterday's event via live stream (and the rest via liveblog; I had a couple things going on for some of it).

I did find the price reduction of the Apple TV mildly interesting, as it shows that Apple wants more of those devices out there.  And they're good devices; I do have one, although I don't use it a whole lot.  But what it would take to get me excited about them are a couple things: a faster processor (A7 or A8 should be easy enough), an app store, and a real gigabit connection (for playing high bit rate, HD content).  Lopping thirty dollars off the price is nice, but doesn't come close to addressing any of those three issues.

The HBO thing is a little bit tempting.  I don't watch any HBO shows, although I'd like to watch 'Last Week, Tonight'.  The bits of that that I've caught on youtube are just incredibly good.  Best in-depth news show on the air (and no, that's not meant sarcastically.  I don't think anything, on any network, even comes close.  Better in width, perhaps, but not even close, in terms of depth), and I like the specific issues they've been tackling.

The point is, I'm not sure if that show is worth that much, but it's tempting.  I'll probably at least take advantage of the free month, next month.  And it might get me to take a look at some of the other shows (Game of Thrones should be right up my alley, although I've actually had zero temptation to watch it.  Not sure why).

If I still used notebooks, I'd be going bonkers over the new MacBook.  That looks like an incredibly sweet machine.  They weren't kidding about all the work going in to making that one possible; there were some really nice improvements.

Like Siracusa, I'm wondering why there isn't a second port (symmetrically on the other side), but that's the only thing close to a weakness that I can see.  Well, and, to a lesser degree, that access to that port is going to be a bit of a mess, wire-wise.  But if I still used laptops, I'd be all over that thing.  I certainly want to see a Magic Trackpad for my iMac with those technologies built in.

With that CPU, and that much memory, the MacBook isn't a workhorse of a machine, but it looks amazing for light-duty work.

ResearchKit is definitely an example of Apple putting the right foot forward.  I'm a little skeptical about adoption, but the potential is there for a major game-changer for medical research.  And I'd love to see it happen.  Heck, it'd make it easy enough (at least, it might), that I might get involved in some studies, even without compensation.

This is something that probably wouldn't've happened under Jobs (I'm 90+% sure it wouldn't have, at least before Jobs became so ill), but that is a great idea.  Cook, I think, has very different strengths and weaknesses than Jobs, but I find it far from clear that he is an inferior CEO, despite all the nay-sayers I've heard.

Getting on to the meat of the event, they finally got to the Watch, itself.  And I'm still not terribly excited about it, although much of that has to do with not being a watch-wearer.  It occurred to me, while watching the event, though, that it would probably be a great fit for my wife.  So I'll probably order one for her on day one.  For me, I'll think about it more seriously when the second generation comes out (next year, presumably).

Basically, the fitness stuff would be nice, and I'd really like having Apple Pay so easily available.  But those are really the only things for which I, personally, would use one.  Those aren't worth that much to me.  But there were some really cool apps they talked about.

The funniest, I thought, was the speakerphone.  Nothing new, technology-wise, in that (although you do have to wonder if developing that was what drove the development of the Continuity features in iOS and OSX), but what I found funny about it was what it would likely do to battery life.  Still, it's a great capability, even if it will chew your batteries in no time.