Apple is about to make old iPhones and iPads feel brand new
We’re here in San Francisco on the eve of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. While the company has used the opening keynote to launch iPhones and MacBooks, it’s mostly a software showcase, as the name suggests. This year, the software reveal will trump any hardware announcements: iOS 7 the next version of Apple’s mobile operating system — will bring a whole new experience to iPhone and iPad.
There are absolutely no confirmed details yet on this, just guesswork, leaks and inevitabilities.
Now that Jony Ive, Apple’s masterful design chief (and a knight of the realm), oversees software as well as hardware, it’s time for Apple to make a bold statement, and answer critics who say that the iPhone’s software a revolution when it first appeared in 2007 now feels like it lags, design-wise, behind competition from Google and Microsoft.
That’s not to say we’re not expecting anything besides iOS. There will most assuredly be news on the OS X front, too — a new version that brings Macs closer to iPads and iPhones.
We’d really like to see Apple announce apps for the Apple TV if that little thing got HBO Go and Amazon Instant Video, I may not bother flipping channels ever again.
And there’s buzz about Apple making deals with music labels for a free, ad-supported streaming music service, though there seems to be some debate over whether it will be debuted now or this fall.
And while it wouldn’t be the first WWDC where no new hardware saw the light of day (2011’s was software-only, too), there’s a chance we’ll see a MacBook Air refresh.
We probably won’t see a new iPad or iPhone this early in the year, and people aren’t holding their breath for the near-mythical iTV and iWatch. Not now.
Still, it’s a long show, generally full of great little news nuggets (Siri! Retina MacBook! iMessage!) So you’re going to want to tune in.
After all, even if you’re not in the market for a new iPhone or iPad, you may get a whole new device come this fall for free. Don’t you want to see what it’ll look like?
