Text and photos by Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
San Francisco- Apple Inc. focused on its key strengths today at the Worldwide Developers Conference by launching iOS 6, Mountain Lion and showing off a revamped notebook line.
For this year’s WWDC, Apple continued to map out its dominance of the mobile space. iOS 6 brings a smarter Siri voice assistant with updated location search function for other countries including Canada. Apple CEO announced that the app ecosystem is alive and thriving with 30 billion downloads. Apple has paid developers over $8 billion based on app sales.
“iOS 6 continues the rapid pace of innovation that is helping Apple reinvent the phone and create the iPad category, delivering the best mobile experience available on any device,” said Scott Forstall, Apple’s senior vice president of iOS Software. “We can’t wait for hundreds of millions of iOS users to experience the incredible new features in iOS 6 including the new Maps app, expanded Siri support, deep Facebook integration, Shared Photo Streams and the innovative new Passbook app.”
iOS 6 also introduces a new Maps application that includes turn-by-turn directions as well as slickly rendered views taken from various aerial shots.
The new maps app jettisons Google Maps on iOS and indicates that Apple is ready to compete directly with Google in an area that they once partnered in.
Among the other features included in iOS 6, which is coming this Fall, is a new app called PassBook which will integrate coupons, online bookings, plane tickets, concert tickets and various loyalty cards in one place.
This is one step closer to the mobile wallet and greatly increases the usefulness of an iOS powered device for transactions and will fit right in when the next iPhone is revealed to have NFC (Near Field Communication) capabilities.
The new 15.4 inch MacBook Pro was the big story of the day. While the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro line received processor and feature refresh, the new flagship MacBook Pro brings the thinness, portability and long-ish battery life of the MacBook Air with the power of the pro line with new Retina Displays.
“The MacBook Pro with Retina display pushes the limits of performance and portability like no other notebook,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “With a gorgeous Retina display, all flash architecture and a radically thin and light design, the new MacBook Pro is the most advanced Mac we have ever built.”
This new notebook, which is available in Canada for $2,229 for the model with 2.3 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. The 3.6 GHz variant, offers 8GB of memory and 512GB of flash storage starting at $2,829.
All in all, WWDC 2012 sees Apple bolstering its position in areas where it traditionally dominates and it also gave its developer community a glimpse of all the features and functionality that they can build on to continue creating a dynamic ecosystem.
