Assorted Afflatuses

Color me disappointed. This morning, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs, in his annual sermon to the faithful at Apple's Worldwide Developers conference, announced two less-than-attention grabbing products, mixed with a handful of other minor, technical tidbits.

I'll start with the good. Since Apple announced the iPhone SDK back in April, many — myself included — wondered how applications like instant messaging would work, since Apple forbade developers from running background processes, even after the application quit. In other words, for an instant messaging application, it would not have been possible to receive instant messages while using another application on the phone, such as Maps or Weather.

Fortunately, Apple debuted a brilliant solution to the problem with a push notification service that allows developers to ping a person's iPhone when new information becomes available. Hooray!

Apple's .mac replacement, MobileMe, is nice, but hardly revolutionary. It only makes me feel slightly less idiotic for giving Apple $100 every 12 months for a suite of Internet services. Still, I welcome the over-the-air magic synchronization features, à la Microsoft Exchange, especially since they cost me nothing more than I pay now.

Then came the much-anticipated iPhone with 3G radio, or "iPhone 3G." When first I read of the announcement, I felt good. For $200 less than I paid for the first iPhone last June, Apple would sell me an iPhone with super-speedy 3G data connectivity, a real live GPS module for genuinely accurate positioning and a blessedly non-recessed headphone jack. What was not to love?

Once again, AT&T, that demon of a service provider, stole the whiz-bang magic from Apple's product announcement. While Apple dropped the initial purchase price of the 3G iPhone (with 16 gigabytes of storage) to $299 from $499, AT&T increased the price of the special iPhone cellular service package.

Now, instead of paying $20 a month — plus the price of my voice plan — AT&T wants $30 for the special suite of iPhone cellular services. That lovely little piece of fine print moves my cost of upgrade to $540 from $299, assuming I have the iPhone 3G for 2 years. For not only do I have to buy a new phone, I have to give AT&T even more money for their less-than-perfect service.

I was also a little put out that Steve said nothing whatsoever about the Mac.

After I bought my iPhone last June, it quickly became apparent that I no longer needed a laptop computer. My phone does a more than adequate job of retrieving my email, keeping my calendar in sync and giving me access to information online.

With that in mind, I have been hoping, since June 2007, that Apple would release the chimerical prosumer Mac, a rung above the iMac and a rung below the Mac Pro. I may be a sophisticated computer user, but I do not need two quad-core processors. I would, however, like a Macintosh without a built-in monitor with a little more pep than an iMac and a little more room on the end-user side to modify the hardware.

I suppose there is always next year.