What are you going to get from Apple this year? Apple's Latest Updates by rafomac

Apple made some huge announcements today. The first of this kind after the keynote legend , Steve Jobs , passed away. Today’s keynote presentations were pretty big for Tim Cook and team at Apple. It signified a major product series launch. It defines the future of Apple in a way. Though I missed the charisma Steve had  when he delivered keynotes for the core products, If he was alive, he would’ve proudly told us how he was able to leverage the crucial cash balance to outbalance the most important application in  iPhones and iPads, the Maps.

Apple has introduced a series of new products at the WWDC’12 keynote series , starting off a week of developer presentations and tutorials and so on. Though it was very much costlier than the earlier WWDC’s , the attendance was full .The tickets to WWDC was sold out in hours. This is remarkable considering that the key person who was the reason for seats to get filled is no more in this world. But people certainly believe that Apple is in good hands. And it did pay off, at least this year it did.
So , I will round-up the major announcements made up at the WWDC ,

iOS 6

iOS 6 was almost certainly expected out of this year’s WWDC as it has become a tradition , as Scott Forstall rightly pointed out during his keynote  of iOS6,  for Apple to release a new version of the OS at WWDC . iOS6 has vastly improved , both feature-wise and usability wise.
Key features noted are :

• A more advanced Siri , who can respond to personalized queries about sports , actresses and literally everything under the sun now.  Tight integration with feed providers like Rotten Tomatoes for Movies , Yelp for Restaurant ratings and other content providers have enabled this rich functionality addition to Siri.
• Chinese support . To write , to read and to socialize. iOS6 has features for interaction in Mandarin  through Haiku , Baidu and other popular Chinese websites.
  
• Facebook integration  . A single sign on  ( just like Twitter integration in iOS5 ) , will enable you to update and post from almost all the apps with unlimited combinations to your friends.
• Lost & Found feature lets you display your backup phone number on the lock screen by triggering it through your Mac or another phone number  when you lose your phone. The finder can just click on it and call you right away.
• Improved Safari – with native support to Chinese , Unified search bar ( Much like Omnibox
• in Google Chrome ).
• Voice mail shortcuts on the Phone screen – A feature slightly ripped off from Android , I must say. But they have improved on it . As usual !.   It now features a temporary whitelisting when a caller calls you ( or nags you ) multiple times, odds are that it will be important.
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Maps

This was the most anticipated feature of all. Maybe even more than the iOS6 as a whole. This position taken by Apple seriously threatens the revenue generation of Google and their data collection as well. Apple has decided to part their ways with Google on the Maps , mainly owing to the fact that they didn’t like Google collecting location details of all Apple devices  when they themselves had huge amount of applications of it.
Rightly so , Apple has implemented a lot of cool and useful features into their own version of Maps.

• Turn by Turn Navigation  on most cities. Ofcourse , Siri will be guiding you. Who else do you expect to guide you properly. 
• FlyOver – Coolest feature you would ever want in a Maps application, But Google has already managed to do a similar data usage on their new version of Maps last week itself. Flyover takes you through a 3D flyover over select cities , by utilizing the vector models of the cities collected by Apple.

 

MacBook Pro

While they mostly updated the technical specs alone on their MacBook Air line up, Apple has whipped up a useful and flashy move on the MacBook Pro lineup. For starters , they killed off the 13” and 17” Macbook Pro’s . Then they decided to remodel the entire philosophy behind MacBook, not just the physical form.

As a result, We got this :

It’s certainly thinner , sleek and elegantly beautiful. More than the MacBook Air  in a certain way. Tightly packed aluminium body with the display crafted into the unibody structure . Only Apple can make a win-win with this kind of innovation.
They have added some extras onto this :

• USB 3.0
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Thunderbolt ports
• HDMI
• Nvidia GT 650 M – a welcome addition to the Mac Line-up.
• 8 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3L RAM

They have removed certain features as well :

• Optical Drive
• Magnetic Hard Disk
• Boring Old Display
• Noisy Fan

The key feature of the new MacBook Pro line up is it’s elegant display. Crafted into the aluminum and insanely thin. But with a whopping resolution of 2880×1800 pixels. Oh yeah, that’s a huge amount of pixels to be on a 15.4” screen. And Apple is calling it , the Retina Display . Yes, MacBook is getting it finally!.
Also , it has a 256 GB / 512 GB Flash storage. Apple decided to finally respond to a decade old problem of slow I/O devices. They chucked the magnetic hard drives. And they decided to top it off by removing the optical drive as well. Remember , Apple removed FDD’s from the iMacs , causing it to become obsolete . This will repeat again , I’m sure of that.