“Apple Inc.’s two-hour keynote at its Worldwide Developer [sic] Conference was high on incremental improvements to its software and news that perhaps only software developers could love, but the company appears to be laying the groundwork for future products in the areas of wearable computing and the connected home,” Therese Poletti writes for MarketWatch.
“Perhaps among the geekier of introductions at WWDC on Monday was news that Apple is launching software development kits in health care and for the home. It is also launching a new programming language called Swift, which got big cheers from the developers in the audience, with the promise to make it easier for developers to create apps for the iPhone and other Apple products more quickly and easily,” Poletti writes. “But with some on Wall Street hoping for more specific hardware news, Apple’s shares dipped slightly as it became clear there would be no major product launch, beyond the company’s release of its next generation operating system for the iPhone, called iOS 8.”
“Still, for all the disappointment, it seems clear that Apple is going to be launching products in both the smart home arena and/or wearable computing,” Poletti writes. “Analysts still believe that Apple will eventually launch an iWatch that can probably act as a health monitoring device and will also synch with other Apple devices.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As WWDC stands for Worldwide Developers Conference: Mission Accomplished!
We’re sure the next Apple Shareholders Meeting will bore the shit out of developers, too.
Related articles:
Apple’s HealthKit aims to unite wearables and fitness apps – June 2, 2014
Apple releases iOS 8 SDK with over 4,000 new APIs – June 2, 2014
Apple unveils iOS 8, the biggest release since the launch of the App Store – June 2, 2014
Apple announces OS X Yosemite for Macintosh – June 2, 2014
You can be an analyst and be wrong, you can be disappointed in the software offerings, but to be disappointed because a developer conference contained no major hardware announcements is utter stupidity. Also, where are the analysts who say hardware is dead anyway?
Who believes that the “investors” are disappointed?? All they have to go on are the ANALyst’s description of what THEY think is important and the “notes” they send off to their contacts. It really amazes me that people can be so damn stupid to vote based on what these jerks say. Then again, in this day and age, uninformed people are easily swayed with promises. Remember how “Hope and Change” was gonna make the country better 6 years ago? Same old crap, different year. It sure makes me glad that I am coming up on 72 years of age and won’t have a helluva lot of time left to put up with this BS!!
ANALyst at least the stupid ones can’t even see what all this groundwork in Software ultimately leads to. Truly stupid aren’t they?
“Apple’s shares dipped slightly as it became clear there would be no major product launch”
Hence, for those who can’t read, they needed an image of a new piece of Apple hardware for them to keep their excitement up to keep them holding their Apple shares.
I found the implications of the advances in functionality to be quite amazing. No need for a dropbox account anymore and universal notifications & docs across all devices and taking calls routinely on my MBPro via automatic WiFi connection to iPhone is terrific.
While I’m sure many will be pleased, I am surprised that Apple caved in and did iDrive a la DropBox. I didn’t think that fit in with their file management philosophy.
Apple was working on it way before they tried to buy dropbox in 2009. When dropbox refused the buyout Jobs told them they would crush them… that day has come.
This type of file management has always been part of the plan, but obviously it’s not an easy thing to get right, particularly on the scale Apple has to work in. Dropbox is great and all, but they WISH they had the number of users Apple does… so as always, Apple takes it’s time and (hopefully) gets it right.
Yup, iDisk came before Dropbox.
Personally, iDisk was great for me and I was extremely disappointed when it went away. I hope iDrive gives me back much of the functionality.
Investors who don’t see the potential of Apple’s new announcements are morons. HealthKit and HomeKit, along with the convergence efforts and new programming language, are positioning Apple to be by far the easiest, most convenient, and most plug-and-play mobile device make for at least the next 10 years.
Plus, I’m surprised no one has made mention of the iPhone images Apple used throughout the presentations. They looked like iPod nanos, but with the screen taking up almost the entire front surface save 1-3 mm on each edge. Apple may have been sneakily previewing the iPhone 6.
I’m pretty sure they just cropped the image of the phone at the top and bottom.
Yah, that’s been the same as past presentations. It has always caught my eye, too, but is insignificant.
On the money, Bizlaw. Apple just laid the foundation for the largest skyscraper in the world today, and all these silly investors can see is the big hole. You’ve got to be ignorant not to see the import of today’s presentation. It lays out the most robust set of development tools and options to make Apple’s iOS the powerful hub of a digital lifestyle. I was very impressed, and didn’t miss the hardware. It’s the Software, dummies, and this stuff looked great!
Great metaphor, Spark! Makes it easy to tell my friends what Apple have just done.
I noticed that the thermostat they displayed when talking about the connected home looked like a Honeywell model. Not Nest!
BTW, if they were bored, they clearly didn’t watch the portions with Craig Federighi. He is excellent on stage!
Agreed, he’s as close to Jobs as you’re likely to get plus he actually knows the nuts and bolts of technology. Apart from Jobs have the authority and presence of being CEO, there is an argument that could be made that Federighi is almost better at this type of things (demos etc) than Jobs was.
Craig is good.
enthusiasm with humour.
even Cook is improving.
it was boring for the most part for home users. thats why Fred joked that people at home don’t know what their were talking about
Yosemite is sweet so far, this day is huge!.
Sorry fandroids
Don’t be sorry for Fandroids. 😊
Yup. They can always switch. They also can buy a Mac and keep using their Android phone with an old OS installed, although I can’t understand why you would do that.
is it possible to learn Swift if you have no experience as a developer? or would you need to learn other languages first?
Swift is designed to abstract away the syntax complexities of the Objective-C and C languages without leaving out any of the functionality. It compiles to the same native binary as any Objective-C program. That means you can write an entire program in Swift while leverages (importing) existing Objective-C frameworks, all through an easier-to-learn language. It’s not a “lite” version of the programming language, but a new, simpler version.
Okay, now can someone translate what ‘coolfactor’ just said?
The new language takes out the garbage for you
Almost literally (programming-wise). Memory management, also known as garbage collection, will now be done automatically.
I think I penned a rare double synecdoche, maybe even a triple.
Ahh, so Apple is only now just catching up to where Android has been for years. Yay for innovation. Oh wait, nevermind. Cook and Ive both should be fired.
Where are the fine-grained resource permissions for Android? iOS has had that for years, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to implement *that* than to re-engineer an entire programming language.
iOS has had ARC, an alternative to garbage collection, since 2011.
You can learn it, but it isn’t a weekend project or on-the-side fun time activity if you’re not already into programming.
It’s still programming, and most people have no clue how to even start. Swift won’t change that, but it will make life far easier for developers while making them wonder why they bother with the headaches of Android.
It’s like the difference between English and German.
English has proved itself to be a powerful language over the centuries, but it has many inconsistencies which is why you have grammar nazis (like myself) who get upset when people do not structure their spoken sentences as they would if they were writing and who go absolutely mad when written sentences aren’t structured in the correct way.
German, however, doesn’t allow for those inconsistencies and anomalies.
Swift in this analogy is like German; it appears to be a powerful high-level language in which the ability to write poorly structured, buggy code is mitigated and the code is rationalised to bare bones.
Those with longish memories may remember that – many, many years ago – Apple was on the verge of releasing a language called Dylan which was targeted at the Newton platform and eventually the Mac OS itself; of course, Newton never really fulfilled it’s promise and Dylan was canned.
Swift has the feeling of that project reborn and re-imagined: a language shorn of complex syntax capable of being prototyped in an interpreted environment, but ultimately compiled as a runtime with prodigious performance and access to Apple’s luxuriant family of APIs.
I’ve only read a bit of the docs, but at first glance it looks very easy, and very powerful. If you’ve every programed even a simple scripting language, you can grasp Swift. Most noob’s need a lot of example code, so a more established language will be easier to master quickly due to sheer numbers, but Apple has been very good in the past with extremely helpful docs and samples. And everyone I know is excited to try it, so I’m sure YouTube will be loaded with tuts at release time.
As for me… I’ll miss the square brackets and semi-colons… but looking forward to Swift…
Intelligent investors were not bored because they realized the software improvements were going to lead the way for new hardware and substantial improvements to the operations of existing hardware products. These investors know what makes Apple stand out. They see creativity and innovation and realize why Apple leads and others copy or follow.
Ditto!
you are so right, I think, but a little worried if you exclude the “bored” non-intelligent investors 🙂
If they were bored it was because of their grey flannel imaginations.
I’ll use the fake WWDC headline banner words from yesterday and update it to be more specific:
Samsung, start your photocopiers!
Samsung can’t copy this stuff. Google would have to, and Google can’t do it either. That would take full commitment, something Google has never been able to do.
Samsung can, actually. Samsung’s releasing a phone using their in-house Tizen operating system, which isn’t built on top of Android like their current much-maligned Touchwiz is.
“That would take full commitment, something Google has never been able to do.”
So much excellently expressed in one short sentence!
True MDN though maybe we just lack a personality who can make a new flavour of bubblegum seem like innovation. Quite like the jokiness but can appear a bit inward looking at times, bit like the real world doesn’t exist out there. Developers are rightly the focus but the rest of us were never forgotten by SJ. I will be a bit concerned if a further 6 months goes by without at least some reference to that good advice. There really is only so many claims of great products that won’t attract ridicule to even the most loyal supporter by then.
zzz…wha?…zzz..the great new products in the pipeline?…zzz..never mind.
These new APIs and Kits are going to result in a computing experience that no other platform can touch. Samsung, Google and Microsoft will not be able to achieve this level of integration and performance. That’s what was demoed today. It wasn’t a sales pitch for new hardware. Don’t be disappointed in Apple for not releasing new hardware. Be disappointed in yourself for thinking that they were going to.
zzz…huh?
Funny watching the Tim Cook and Apple apologists.
zzzz.
Botvine
zzzz.
zzzzz x infinity +1.
Botvinnik, I have an exciting circular Pickett slide rule for you. Big cool factor. You’ll be the only dude in town with one.
As Spark put it, above, “You’ve got to be ignorant not to see the import of today’s presentation.”
Seriously, @coolfactor nailed it. No other company can even come close to this.
It’s amazing to hear what people think vs. how the world actually works. Apple is vastly more complex than any of the other players, that they aren’t even in the same game.
I must have thought to myself 10-15 times during the keynote “now that is going to be amazing”. Just over and over.
Then there’s the typical doofus thinking “R they gunna make a bigger Iphone or Iwatch or something? Google has one”.
All the amazing stuff Apple just announced and yet there are people rooting for Samsung who can only change the shape and size of a phone. Google can make software, but who knows where it’s going to go, or what it’s going to try and connect to.
This was a developer’s conference, not a new product announcement. Obviously Apple has to be working on several hardware innovations to go with HealthKit and HomeKit. Apple rarely releases hardware at WWDC, and especially not at this one with so many new and interesting software products to cover.
zzz..huh?
Botvine
zzzz.
Let’s see, someone at AT & T surely threw up all over themselves. And then the preemptive search results might have soured some stomachs at Google.
Just two groundbreaking and foundational hints. Apple is steamrollering ahead, refining everything in sight. Soon the iOS ecosystem will be everywhere.
In time for iThink.
Not just refining, but truly advancing developers’ ability to very easily use iOS as their platform of choice for apps that make them money.
I think I heard the entertaining guy with the longish grey hair allude to the fact that Yosemite will contain an email app that will actually work, likely alluding to a fix for the Mavericks IMAP fail. So it looks like many business users will go a full cycle with the current fail. Lesson learned, Dr Dre, blood pressure trackers, and thermostat controllers have priority these days.
I use Mavericks Mail.app with several IMAP accounts at once. Are you holding onto a problem that was already fixed?
He’s holding on to gmail.
Some people have no choice, e.g. work uses the enterprise version of Gmail.
Good Gawd!!!
Hah. Good gawd is right. They’re doomed.
So basically the smart people are excited and the not so bright people aren’t. The smart ones see the groundwork Apple is laying for the things that will get the rest excited later as Apple takes over all new markets and product categories.
In other news, the most recent Apple Shareholders Meeting bored the hell out of developers. Apple introduced a 7 to 1 stock split, and increased dividends, and increased their stock buyback program – but they failed to deliver a single new API, programming language, or developer tool.
Tim failed to suggest how Apple could benefit financially from these announcements. All the new software is free so there is no obvious revenue stream. Even granted that analysts often lack imagination, it is a bit arrogant for Apple to assume that everyone understands the potential impact of the health and home software for Apple’s bottom line.
Why should Tim take time from the keynote to explain to developers how Apple will make money off of these releases? Developers don’t care — they want to know how THEY can make money off of Apple’s products.
And the answer is very obvious — Apple creates great software that is easy for developers to use and advance their own profit-making apps and hardware products, so more people buy iPhones and iPads and Macs, and get invested in the iOS/OS X universe, so they never want to switch to Android, Windows Phone, BB, etc. They buy apps from Apple, songs from Apple, movies from Apple, software from Apple, hardware from Apple, etc. etc. And they love it, so they keep coming back for the latest, greatest release.
Any questions?
It’s WWDC, Apples World Wide Developers Conference, not an investors conference. If you can’t understand how what was announced can be converted in to revenue then perhaps you should not invest in technology stocks but stick to something simpler.
As an investor, I was wow’d and excited. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Excellent presentations today. CF and TC are a potent pair.
Team Cook keeps building out the infrastructure. Products, from a variety of sources, will soon roll out on these new highways.
Samsung announced a Tizen phone today. What’s a Tizen?
Tizen (Tee-zen). defn. A telephone released by Samsung Corp. that sells millions of units fewer than the iPhone 5C. In yellow.
Bored investors? How can he know that, since Apple stopped trading today. Total lie!
I’m a AAPL investor and I’m extremely happy!!
Apple’s totally integrated hardware coupled ecosystem is going to rule home and office use for efficient safe communications.
That is going to be DIFFICULT for the droids, where code is an afterthought to “search.”
Humph. Any investor who didn’t find today to be SPECTACULAR should probably get out of AAPL, so long.
My favorite thing: The Swift programming language. I hope it lives up to its promise. I’ve been pouring over the free iBook this pm. It’s also up on Apple’s developer site. It could be soooo kewl.
We share some favourite things, just like Maria von Trapp! It’s poring, though. Unless you’ve managed to liquify it.
Thank you dear goddess. But poring does seem odd, like I’m drilling holes into it. I like the visual of ‘pouring’ over it, like my brain is enveloping it in cerebral fluid. 😉
Frankensteinian imagery. Drilling holes could apply as well, through the ancient practice of trepanning.
Sounds delightful! One hole for headache. Two holes for migraine. Three holes for stroke. Four holes for coma. Five holes to determine demon possession…
You seem to be describing ‘holistic medicine,’ LOL
Teeheehee! You’ve put me in a tizzy.
I think one of the biggest things will be how the new Spotlight cuts Google right out of the picture.
Google will rue the day.
Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Incredibly important and groundbreaking stuff announced today.
Steve Ballmer is eating his heart out.
That’s probably quite a big meal.
Analysts are just shills, there job is not to really understand what a bunch of smart people are doing but to either excite the sheep in to buying to scare them into selling so the brokers can make money off the commissions. It doesn’t matter if you make or loose money so long as your trading they get paid.
If you didn’t understand the importance of – for example – Swift or the ability for extensibility in iOS 8 or the value of CloudKit, I would argue you either weren’t paying attention or you didn’t understand the subject.
Those three announcements on their own have an enormous impact on Apple’s future prospects.
Swift will probably make iOS programmers more productive and shorten the development lifecycle for iOS apps and the iteration cycles for Agile/Waterfall developers; the result will be more iOS apps developed – particularly within enterprises – and evolved at an accelerated pace.
Extensibility in iOS 8 will allow applications to work together at the client-side; so an EPOS application running on an iPad (Lightspeed) can interact with a PCI-DSS payments application in a secure manner. This functionality will allow app developers to build their own ecosystems operating within iOS devices as opposed to server-side interaction between cloud-based services.
And then there’s CloudKit; no more scrambling around with Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or – shudder – building your own infrastructure. Want to write a cloud-based service for iOS and/or MacOS, it’s all there for you in XCode and it is – to all intents and purposes – free until you’ve established a substantive customer base. This is the equivalent of Edison developing an electrical grid and giving electricity away to start-up companies in the 19th century and will spur an explosion of cloud-based entrepreneurial creativity.
800 million iOS devices? Sounds like the end of the beginning.