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For me, there's also the matter that Rogers Wireless, Apple's Canadian service provider partner, doesn't serve the part of Canada where I live (the orange arrow in the illustration - I'm some 25 miles from the margin of the nearest Rogers GSM coverage edge).
if I needed a smartphone (I really don't by any rational measure), I would also be giving RIM's Blackberry serious consideration because, for one thing, it has a real keyboard and the iPhone doesn't. I detest touchscreens. Being somewhat neurotically obsessive about keeping display screens clean and smudge/smear-free, the whole idea of routinely touching them gives me the willies. Plus, I find the lack of tactile feedback when "typing" on a virtual keyboard off-putting and clumsy. Sorry, I want a keyboard. BTW: this isn't just a matter of aesthetics and taste for all users, as this report by the L.A. Times Michelle Quinn attests.
That said, I don't doubt that the iPhone Generation 3 will be a big success for Apple. A lot of people obviously really like the iPhone, are willing to pay a hefty tariff to to Apple and its carrier partners to own and use one, and the new model doesn't seem to give aficionados reason to like it less so long as you're willing to live with the official service provider's plan and cost structure.
However, the whole idea of a hardware device being locked down and tethered to one service provider just rubs me the wrong way, and reportedly the 3G iPhone will be a lot harder to unlock, or at least impractical, since you will now be required to activate the phone with the authorized carrier at the time of purchase.
Cellular telephony is not something I've embraced even in the most general terms, it seeming to me to epitomize Ambrose Bierce's century-old assessment of the telephone as "an invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of distance." Land lines are bad enough, but I find the concept of being accessible by telephone anywhere and everywhere repellent rather than appealing.
It's partly a matter of self discipline. I tend to be enough of an internet junkie within of the limitations on dial-up Internet and land line telephones. A concrete example: last Monday; the day of the WWDC keynote, also happened to be first really, no qualifications or excuses, summery day we've so far this year here on the eastern shore of Nova Scotia. It didn't last of course. I rough-drafted this article on Wednesday sitting by a fired-up wood stove with the temperature outside barely 50 degrees in a cold rain, but Monday was a keeper - a day with temperatures in the mid-70s that would be better-than-average for a nice day in July or August here, let alone June 9. I was torn; stay inside, online, and monitor the news coming from San Francisco, or go to the beach. I ended up doing both, but had I been equipped with an iPhone or other smartphone (that would work here), I of course would've been tempted to take it along on the beach excursion to keep an eye on proceedings, and perhaps answer an email or two and...... Which would have ruined it. Just one snapshot example of why I resist the concept. "Because you can," too easily morphs into being an obligation or an addiction, and I prefer to keep some of my pleasures simple and undiluted.
A concept that would appeal to me somewhat more would be telephone (ie: iPhone) capability built into a laptop computer - sort of a MacBook/iPhone hybrid. "PhoneBook" anyone? While typing, Web-surfing, and video-watching on an iPhone are too compromised by the virtual keyboard and small size of the display to not be frustrating to me, a laptop with a 13.3" display and a proper keyboard would not suffer from those deficiencies and phone performance (other than portability/pocketability) would not be compromised by the laptop form factor.
Speaking of which, there were no laptop or other computer system announcements at WWDC, which was disappointing, although not a surprise, as I had expected at most perhaps a MacBook Air speed bump and switch to Penryn CPUs.
Moving along, I was even more underwhelmed by the MobileMe announcement. A revamp and rebranding of Apple's .Mac online service was expected, but I had been hoping for something more innovative, or at least a return to free email, a la Google's Gmail, but what we got was a repackaged .Mac with more iPhone, iCal, and Address Book integration and the same $99 price point.
Back in 2000, Apple launched iTools, as the service was named in its first - and free - iteration, with five components: POP 3 email with the cachet of a mac.com domain name, a Web page authoring tool called HomePage, a Web-filtering service named KidSafe, the iCards electronic greeting card service, and 20MB of remote storage space on a network volume dubbed an iDisk - all free to registered Mac OS 9 users. The service was expanded in July, 2000, with enhanced Homepage capabilities and additional iDisk space available up to 400 MB at an annual rate of a $1 per megabyte.
I immediately signed up, mostly for the email service, as I had other Web-authoring software. iDisk wasn't that enticing while stuck on a dial-up internet connection that gives 26,400 bps connections on good days (alas, eight years later, that's still all that's available in this neck of the woods), and KidSafe was of no utility to me, Indeed, everyone in my family got a mac.com email address, and we bailed out en masse two and a half years later, along with all but 100,000 of the iTools user base, which had reached a claimed 2.4 million by July, 2002, when Steve Jobs announced at Macworld Expo New York, that Apple was pulling the plug on the free iTools service, replacing it with .Mac, which would have an annual fee of $99.00 for pretty much the same package as the erstwhile iTools, plus a few tweaks like IMAP and Webmail - neither of much interest to me - 100 MB of iDisk storage, a file backup service called Backup annexed to iDisk, Symantec's Virex anti-virus software, plus calendar integration with the forthcoming OS X 10.2's iCal application, all of which was essentially of no value to me.
My family and I all shifted to other, still-free email services, and when Google launched its free Gmail email service private beta in 2004 (with a whopping 1GB of storage space, which has subsequently been increased to 6.8 GB per account), we climbed aboard and haven't looked back, so to speak. Gmail is great.
Apple had continued to tinker with .Mac since its debut in 2002, but frankly I stopped paying attention. Pretty much everything of any interest to me that .Mac offered (and more) was available from Google or other services for free or ad-supported, and that will evidently continue to be the case with MobileMe, which still will cost $99 a year.
What Apple should have done with .Mac and MobileMe, IMHO, is offer a free, basic email service plus an a la carte menu of fee-based email enhancements and additional services from which users could pick and choose from, paying for only what they wanted to use.
As for me, I've saved about half the price of a new MacBook by not subscribing to .Mac for the past six years, and I anticipate those savings will continue.
Consequently, the most interesting news out of the WWDC keynote for me personally was OS 10.6, although if it arrives on the projected schedule, a year or so from now, that would be about 18 months after the Leopard release, which is actually three months longer than the average interval (15 months) between post early development era OS X milestone (different cat name) releases.
I'm delighted to hear that Apple will, as senior vice president of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet put it, be "hitting the pause button" on new OS X features in order to refine and stabilize existing ones. I love the new stuff in Leopard, particularly Spaces and Time Machine, but it's still an exasperatingly cranky and buggy kitty even after three updates.
The downside (sort of; I'm all for cutting down on code bloat) is that support for Power PC Macs is evidently being tossed overboard. My current most powerful Mac is a 1.33 GHz PowerBook G4, on which Leopard has been an indifferent performer, so I'm not shattered by the news that OS 10.5 will in all likelihood be the end of the system update road. I should have an Intel Based Mac by the time Snow Leopard is released, and clarification of the OS upgrade roadmap is actually helpful in timing that move.
One question (of several) left hanging is how much Apple will be dinging us for the OS 10.6 upgrade. The Baltimore Sun's David Zeiler has suggested that "a generous Apple might charge $20 or $30, but I think $50 is probable – and fair." Generous Apple? See my comments on iPhone and MobileMe pricing above.
David also wonders whether we might even see tiered pricing, with current Leopard 10.5 users paying $50 and those upgrading from earlier versions paying the full $129. That would make eminent good sense, but with a Snow Leopard launch about a year from now, it will have been 18 months after the Leopard upgrade - three months longer as we noted than the average interval between OS X major version upgrades historically, so I'm guessing it will be $129.
A final thought; some folks are panning the "Snow Leopard" nomenclature, complaining that the esoteric Snow Leopard isn't really a Leopard at all, is somewhat timid and docile, and is mute. Personally, I think it's a great choice of name, quite fitting for an OS release that will concentrate on quiet refinement and polish rather than a slate of loud new features.
Charles W. Moore
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I think .Mac and MobileMe are very easy to use for most people and I am happy to see them adding some features. However having all my info in sync is not that big of a deal for me and I have never cared to instant emails. I use Mozy so I don’t worry about backups. Other then that I think I too will hold off on .Mac and MobileMe until they lower the price or offer something that I can’t live without. I am also a gmail user but I don’t think it’s as easy to use as say yahoo email but I use it because they have spam filters that actually work unlike yahoo. Gmail works great with iPhones too!