The Most Important Thing in the 10/20 Mac Event

Update: My friend Jason T Bedell brings up some good point I didn’t address over on his blog. I also responded to him there.

At Full Sail each student and instructor gets a Macbook Pro so I watch each Apple event carefully.  As I observed what Saleman Jobs rolled out, I had some thoughts. Here they are.

iLife 11 – Meh.  Nothing revolutionary but it looks like some tweaks and improvements. I thought iLife is pretty solid anyway so I understand this logic.  One interesting thing is introducing Face recognition into iMovie (to a certain extent).  The internet right now has a massive amount of video content, but unfortunately it’s not really very searchable.  Once we are able to recognize things in videos (like people, objects etc…) video will be much more useful to teachers. Imaging if you could search Youtube for every video clip that featured the Mona Lisa.  It’s coming with Web 3.0.

New Macbook Air – This is the future of the portable computer.  Lose the optical drive and the hard drive.  Most of your data is in the cloud or on a flash drive.  Decent size, lots of battery.  The CPU is a bit weak apparently but most people won’t notice.

Mac OSX 10.7 Lion – Some usability features are added, which are welcome.  Still, not amazing.

The Most Important Thing.

The biggest announcement is not really surprising when you think about it.  They will have a program that runs on the Mac that lets you run Apps from the iPad and iPhone.  I was kind of wondering how they were planning on doing this but I love how it works.  You can still run your regular programs, but one of the programs is the iOS App layer. What this means is the death of regular programs made for just laptops and iMacs.  Developers always want to create programs for the largest market, so being able to run on all Apple platforms is just ideal.  What is going to happen is more and more programs will migrate over to the iOS side.  Eventually the regular program model will just fade away.  When you buy an app, it will migrate to all of your devices as needed.  Jobs said they have had 7 billion downloads from the App store. Watch that number at least double in the next 12 months.  Verizon iPhone + Mac OSX with Apps. Wow.

How this affects education

This is huge. Imagine this:  You have students who use the iPod Touch with camera to go out and take photos, then you can run a photo app on a regular iMac with a drawing tablet to touch them up.  Finally you transfer the touched up images to an iPad to lay it out with Pages.  You can choose the form factor that works in any case because the apps are on all platforms.

This is really well thought out.  Google I am sure will end up doing the same thing with Android or Chrome OS, and Microsoft will have to follow suit too.  This is the form computing will take in the near future.

• Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: “Mac OS X meets the iPad” – Annotated

   

  • In particular, Jobs highlighted several features that Mac OS X 10.7 would incorporate from iOS: multitouch gestures, an app store, an app home screen, full-screen apps, auto save, and auto resume on launch. This should give both developers and users some idea of what to expect when Lion ships next summer.
  • Lion will also bring a new Mac App Store for all Mac OS X users. Like the iOS App Store, there will be one-click downloads, automatic installation, and automatic updates. Developers will be able to offer both free and paid apps, and will get the same 70 percent revenue split as they do now in the iOS App Store. For users, the apps are automatically licensed for all their machines.
  • the Mac App Store won’t be the only place to get applications—just “the best place.”

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