I didn’t cover the Apple event here on the blog this time (for the first time since the iPad announcement in 2010). But here are some comments:
- Free OS X Mavericks is a smart, but expected move. If you control the hardware and software, you have the luxury to choose where to put your margins. In the mobile age, with free mobile OS updates, it was natural this would come to the desktop.
- New MacBook Pro with Retina Display looks very good. Starting at $1299, it’s hard to justify the purchase of a regular 13” MacBookPro at $1199. That non-Retina model will probably die in the next refresh and I don’t recommend buying that. The best feature I’ve seen is the 2GB GDDR5 on the 15” Retina MBP video card. But not enough to justify an upgrade for me.
- New Mac Pro has a good base configuration at a very good price point at $2999. For dual graphics, it’s almost a bargain. But it would have been best to ship it with a minimum of 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD. Also, 64GB RAM maximum sucks — for a 12-core Xeon E5 processor, I’d expect something between 128GB-256GB RAM. No 4k Cinema Display to pair with it is also disappointing.
- Free iWork apps is another blow at Microsoft Office 365. iWork is much more capable than Google Docs and will probably be omnipresent in the Mac ecosystem now. The only way this strategy may fail is if iCloud lets Apple down. But that never happens, right? Oh wait…
- New iPads: very smart move here by equalizing the specs of both 9.7” and 7.9” iPads. At $100 price difference between the Retina iPad Mini and the iPad Air, the choice will be mainly dictated by the necessity of a bigger display vs. portability. Keeping the old iPad 2 and the old iPad Mini available is somewhat smart: it keeps a relatively low entry barrier to the iOS ecosystem, but this also may lead to frustrations due to iOS 7 performance on this dated hardware.
* Image copyright by Apple Inc., 2013. Used with permission.