WWDC 2011 Thoughts

Apple's logo

I've been excited for weeks; I love the yearly grind of technology which seems to gain momentum slowly except for a few key milestones every year. This is one of those milestones, Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) which takes place every June.

This year, Apple changed tactics and pre-announced some of the topics on the opening day keynote agenda. There was nothing surprising on this list which includes iOS 5, Mac OS X Lion (10.7) and iCloud but it does underscore that most people don't believe there will be an iPhone 5 (or even iPhone 4S) announcement.

So far, much of the speculation has been regarding what the iCloud service will entail. Almost all pundits believe that it will be a revamping of the existing MobileMe service as well as a streaming music service that further enhances the entrenched iTunes ecosystem and competes at least indirectly with offerings from Amazon and Google. So far, the reviews for those two services have been, on average, luke warm.

All the speculation, up until the last few days has largely been mundane, unimaginative and a whole lot of obvious. On the iOS 5 front, we're expecting a new, more flexible notification system, twitter integration, and more voice control. Lion has already announced much of its feature-set and I can say I'm very excited for almost all of it. A full laptop is still where I get most of my work and play done, and will be for the foreseeable future. (I'm eyeing a new laptop, maybe the soon to be announced sandy bridge Airs this summer.)

iCloud, along with the North Carolina data center, has been a source of much speculation for most of the year and this last week has really brought it all to a boil. I think we'll find out (in massive detail) all about Apple's big plans early next week.

This is where things get really interesting. I won't be making any guesses or wishes for next week. However, the last few days has seen some truly inspiring speculation on what the big picture could look like by the end of next week. Here are two of sources are Dave Caolo's 52Tiger post and even bigger thinking by Mozilla Lab's Kevin Fox. Fox's big picture thinking is really a breath of fresh air and pushes the envelope on what we can expect. This line of thinking is good, I believe this is the frame of mind Steve Jobs often operates.

As an interesting side note, my secondary router - a Linksys used in bridge mode - failed two weeks ago. Since the debut of 802.11b, I've been buying routers at roughly once a year rate, sometimes to upgrade technology but often to replace failing hardware. I finally decided that Apple's approach to hardware might also solve this constant cycle of disposable IT hardware and purchased an Airport Extreme to serve as my primary router in the house. I haven't looked back since; it has worked perfectly and I'd easily recommend it to anyone. So much so, that when my second (Linksys) router failed a week or two ago, I decided I was done replacing it constantly and was going to get a second Apple router, this time a Time Capsule. This would give me the ability to wirelessly back up my laptop, even via wifi. Up to this point, I've tried various different combinations of external drive, then windows share on my Linux desktop, and finally back to a local USB drive.

The problem is, when I went to purchase this Time Capsule, all reputable vendors I could find no longer had any stock; I searched Amazon (2-5 weeks) and ten "local" Best Buys (Backordered), all with no luck. Soon, I saw reports online that was also making this observation and speculation has begun on what this could mean. I, for one, am very interested as I happen to be in the market for a replacement anyway. I think this could be one of the biggest surprises announced next week; expect an A5 powered, iOS executing, little half-server, half-router machine to make an appearance and become the center of the iTunes hardware universe next week...