Apple announcement thoughts

I wasn't particularly overwhelmed by the iPad/Mac announcement by Apple this month. I also was not underwhelmed, per-se. I suppose you could say, in the famous words of Jon from Front Page Tech, I was simply "whelmed."

I think iPad Air 2 is a logical upgrade from iPad Air, and it looks really nice in a lot of ways. I appreciate that Apple is really trying to save the tablet and define a role for it.

The iMac with Retina 5K display is super killer, and I think it was something that Apple had to announce. They've been catching a lot of flack recently for not improving the screens on iPhone to HD quality. While I will still argue that that spec doesn't matter, this was a little jab back that Apple can still build the best display in the industry.

I was most disappointed by what I didn't see, though, not what I did see. Apple missed a great opportunity today to nip the Nexus Player in the bud by at least announcing an Apple TV update with voice search and an open app ecosystem (with games). And they didn't take that opportunity. Voice search is hard, yes, but I think that their Siri system would be good enough for the task. Even just using Siri dictation to perform the search would be better than typing. Opening up the app ecosystem is something that Apple is going to have to do if they want to stay competitive in the TV space, though.

One reason for avoiding the game announcement could be that it will not rival console quality, and Apple is about experience, not features. The lack of app support is still surprising, though. Another issue that they could be working for is that the hardware in Apple TV boxes is pretty old compared to modern iOS devices, so the experience would be pretty poor, even if developers made significant optimizations.

In general, I guess, it just seemed to me that Apple gave us everything that we were expecting, and nothing more. And it doesn't look like there's anything else that might come of it. I'm excited by Google's announcements, though, because there's huge potential for more to come when developers get on board (if developers get on board).

But those are just my thoughts. Let me know what you think in the comments below.