News: Apple Unleashes a Flurry of Updates at WWDC '09

Ah, Apple press conferences. It's always fun to watch the masses willing to come together and sacrifice their lunch hour following Tweets and live blogs, just to catch the latest glimpse of what Jobs' got in store for the rest of the financial fiscal year. Luckily, if you happen to be one of the few that didn't even realize this was going on, then you're in luck! Here's a summary of all that goodness that Apple mentioned yesterday at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2009 made concise for your skimming convenience.

In the Apple laptop category, we've got updates galore, with the Macbook Pros seeing the most consumer-sided benefits with an unbelievable price drop down to $1699 for their entry level model. The bad? Batteries are all non-removable now. Hurray...

The 13" unibody Macbook is now part of the "Macbook Pro" club, and the Air also gets a huge chop in MSRP down to $1499. Also, the ExpressCard slots (that about 1% of the people we know even realize exist) are now replaced with SD card readers. Definitely more practical in our opinion.

The new Leopard Mac OS will also being coming later this year, with a bunch of tweaks that are way too long to be listed here. You can view the full list of features over at the Apple website. It will be available in Sept. 2009 for a mere $29 for Leopard upgraders.

Now onto the iPhone. We now have a new model called the iPhone called the 3GS, which features fancy new features like twice the performance, video, and voice control. The ugly? If you're an early 3G [corrected] adopter, AT&T won't be cutting you any slack. Instead, they'll be asking for $200 for an upgrade. The good? The older iPhone models now start at $99 for the 8GB model. Sweeeet!

That's pretty much the highlights for the show. There was some other fancy Safari talk, but like most things, we'll believe it when we see it. Meanwhile, we'll just stick with our Firefox hacking and get our doubly browsing speeds on, thank you very much.

Enjoy your daily dose of news for today? Let us know your thoughts on the Apple updates in the comments!

(Via Engadget)

Comments (6)

I am an early iphone adopter, still have the 1st Gen Iphone and am getting the rebate. Is that what you mean by "early?"

as nice as i think user replaceable batteries are, i had an ibook for 4 years and now a MBP for 2; never once have i replaced the battery. i almost did for the ibook as it only held a charge for an hour toward the end, but 4 years for a computer is long enough and by that time most people want to upgrade. hell, i'd upgrade now if they still offered matte screens!
i would have preferred a multi-card reader rather than an SD slot. us professional photographers and people who use higher end DSLRs all use CF cards. a multi-card slot would have made so much more sense. the express slot was great because you could get a multi-card reader for it. not to mention wireless air-cards. what are business users on the road supposed to use now? or are they going to force their company to buy them a USB version?

i pre-ordered the 3GS iphone. bought the original iphone on day 1 and have been waiting for a 32gb version. there's enough new in this version compared to the 3G to make the upgrade worthwhile. still stinks about the plastic back. i much prefer the metal of the original.

gpollach - by early adopter they're referring to 3G customers who bought their phone last year. the price was subsidzed and users were required to sign a two year agreement and at this point they're only 11 months into that. the original iphone was not subsidized and thus those users are eligible for the lowest price offered on the new 3GS.

Cheers,
M

I'm guessing they left the expresscard slot on the 17" Pro for photography professionals like you Matt.

etslee -
same with the option of a matte screen.
but 17" for a laptop is ridiculous. 15" is perfect, at least for me. it just doesn't make sense why they'd remove the slot on some, but not all of the range. likewise, why only offer matte as an option on the 17" and not the rest of the range?

Yeah, I plan on grabbing a new 13" Macbook in Sept when Snow gets released, but I'm sure that glossy screen's going to drive me nuts..

zaphod-
that's what you have an external monitor for when you get home. but for traveling, carrying a 17" simply doesn't make sense. but hey, different stroks for different folks.