Hey, What About the Mac at WWDC '08?

As a Mac user, I was feeling ripped off after seeing the keynote address at WWDC '08. I know Steve warned us up front that he will just be talking about the iPhone, but that doesn't lessen the months of anticipation leading up to it. And then the rest of the conference that will have some Mac info is under radio silence. Meh.

So where does the keynote leave us? With two things that touch on us Mac users: MobileMe and Snow Leopard. MobileMe is the overdue replacement for .Mac services and Snow Leopard is the next generation of Mac OS X.

The Golden 5
Let's start with MobileMe. Apple has lots of info about it on its website you can see here, including an in-depth video tour. The thing that stands out is that MobileMe really emphasizes 5 components from .Mac: Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Gallery and iDisk. Other aspects of .Mac are barely mentioned and some will be dropped, most notably, support for Panther (OS X 10.3). From the .Mac to MobileMe transition FAQ:

Are any other .Mac features affected?
As part of this transition to MobileMe, some features are being discontinued: Web access to bookmarks (bookmark sync between your Macs and/or PCs is still supported), iCards, .Mac slides, and support for Mac OS X 10.3 Panther sync.

Honestly, these five features don't really do much for me. I won't go into here because there is all the info you need about them on Apple's website. They bring some of .Mac's services up to par, but don't really break new ground other than making them much more attractive than the other web services. Except for one thing that has got me excited: large file sharing via email notification.

The New Shiny Thing
Large file sharing appears to be executed just as it should be. You select the file in your iDisk and click the Share File button. From there you designate email addresses to share it to, a password if you want to and how long the file is accessible. Then email is sent to the recipients notifying them they can click right there in their email message to begin downloading the file. You can see it in action in MobileMe iDisk Quick Tour video.

Basically, this let's you bypass services like YouSendIt to send links to others to download large files by email. For me, this is huge. This is the level of improvement that I expected in MobileMe across the board. This is what I look to Apple for.

Groups? Hellooooo…Anyone home?
The one .Mac service I kind of like and was looking for a big improvement was in the .Mac groups. The transitional FAQ mentions that the usual .Mac services like iWeb publishing, photo and movie sharing and syncing will remain, but Groups wasn't on the In or Out lists. I've used .Mac groups, then moved on to Google Groups, and was planning to return to .Mac Groups, but now I don't know what to expect. You can probably guess I would have loved to see some real innovation brought to Groups in the new MobileMe services. One can dream…

Snow Leopard
What wasn't discussed in the keynote but mentioned and then followed up on was the next generation of OS X 10, Snow Leopard. I expect it will be covered thoroughly during the conference, but not talked about much outside of it. Apple has posted a preview page that has some information on it. The key takeaway here is that Snow Leopard will not be including any mind blowing new features, but a tightening up of the underpinnings to provided a faster, more stable experience. <Yawn!>

I can't imagine the marketing team will be able to sell this approach for $129, so something will be different in how it's presented in final form. Perhaps it will be sold with an incidental fee like iPhone 2.0 is to iTouch users. One clue to what's really going on could be noticed in the banners at the conference: It's being called OS X Leopard (and presumably OS X Snow Leopard when it comes) as well as OS X iPhone. No use of the word Mac.

Also, this makes me think that by reducing scope and focusing on the internals, it leaves Apple capacity to expand OS X iPhone, really making it robust. Why would this be important? This is the type of effort that would be needed to bring out the rumored Mac Tablet, or more likely now, iPod Tablet running OS X iPhone 2.5 or whatever it will be when it debuts. Perhaps as early as Macworld '09.

What do you think? Let us know in the Comments section below.

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