Apple surprises from WWDC

Some of the announcements at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) were pedestrian upgrade bullet-points: faster processors, chipset bumps, point releases... all good, but not unexpected. But some were zingers, big announcements designed to surprise the market, raise the bar, and outfox competitors. You can read a more comprehensive round-up of the WWDC announcements here - this is a look at some of the curveballs which caught our eye.

Apple is never shy to jump a few steps ahead on technology curves, sometimes keeping ahead of predictable tech evolution, sometimes actively bending the curve to the company's design.

First was that screen. The famous Retina display from the iPad made its expected debut in notebook format. And what a screen it is. Apple's 27-inch external display offers 2 560x1 440 resolution. The 15-inch retina display in the MacBook Pro runs higher than that: 2 880x1 800 (and the iPad runs at 2 048x1 536). The highest display resolution available in top-end notebooks from most PC manufacturers is 1 900x1 080. For now, the Retina display is a luxury feature available in only a single MBP model with a hefty price tag, but that will likely change over time, moving throughout the notebook range.

Although the screen is beautiful, most applications won't take full advantage of it from the outset. To avoid shrinking down to tiny smudges of text and minute icons, apps are pixel-scaled so they stay the same effective size as they were in the previous generation of screen. The same technique is used in the new iPad.

Applications, which are retooled for the new display, will be able to take full advantage of all that screen real estate, but whether your apps are upscaled or not, the screen is still the same crystal-clear jaw-dropper you'll find in the iPad.

You can't have the new display, or even the old display, any larger than 15 inches. The 17-inch MacBook Pro is now officially dead, possibly because the retina display isn't yet viable in that form factor, but more likely because the model just didn't sell very well. The small, but clearly defined niche of Apple users who need large laptop displays is simply out of luck for now.

Not only was the MacBook Pro range upgraded in every department, it was also slimmed down. Apple's designers managing to shave it down to 1.8cm and a hair over 2kg in weight. The MacBook Air, for comparison, is 1.7cm at its thickest point, with the 13-inch model weighing 1.35kg.

In other words, the MacBook Pro is looking more and more like the MacBook Air, and the differences in hardware are starting to narrow as well, with the MBP line moving to SSD storage and dropping optical drives.

The port layout in the new MacBook range raises some interesting points too. USB 3.0 features, with one port on either side, and two side-by-side Thunderbolt ports (the high-speed technology capable of powering external displays, multiple USB channels, networking and more). FireWire is gone, but Thunderbolt-to-FireWire adapters will provide compatibility with existing devices.

More significantly, Ethernet is a goner. The MacBook Pros now offer WiFi only, a decision which has raised a lot of criticism. The stereotypical multimedia professional Apple user, moving gigabytes of video, sound and graphics across the network, is the most likely to be impacted by this decision. The decision makes a certain sense if you look at the use-case from Apple's point of view - at a fixed desk you have the option of a Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet dongle ($30), or an external screen with built-in Ethernet (Apple's 27-inch Thunderbolt display: $999).

On the other hand, HDMI has made an appearance at last. Swap the DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter in your bag for that Ethernet dongle.

Optical drives are also no more, leaving only external drives as options, just as on MacBook Airs. In an era of cloud storage, SD cards and flash disks, optical drives will be unwept and unsung by most.

Hard drives also no longer feature in Apple's notebook line-up. It's all SSD now, and while that adds to the price, the difference between flash storage and conventional notebook drives is shrinking. Apple has, as it tends to, taken the plunge towards technology which enables it to push the envelope in terms of form factor.

Compromise for the sake of design isn't always welcome. The new MacBook Pros are officially un-upgradable in the RAM department: memory is soldered directly in place in every model, a decision which many have painted as Apple's attempt to strong-arm buyers into paying the company's high-margin rates for memory at the time of purchase, but is equally likely just another form-factor nettle, which Apple has grasped as firmly as ever. Dismantled MBPs show just how tightly the components are squeezed together - it is clearly becoming harder and harder to shave millimetres off successive models, especially since the battery, unlike the other components, isn't getting any smaller.

The SSD isn't soldered in place, but is a non-standard format, meaning that until OEMs catch up you can't upgrade that, either.

The software announcements were where the real gold lay, not because the slew of new features in iOS 6 and OSX Mountain Lion were particularly noteworthy, but because of the underlying strategies which they reveal.

Several separate announcements make up one major strategic push, and that's the cloud. Not just iCloud, Apple's hugely upgraded platform for synchronising data between devices, but also extending with social media integration with Facebook and Twitter, which have both received deep integration into iOS and OSX and feature in the refreshed APIs for developers, and iMessage, now coming to OSX as well.

The close ties with Facebook are also pertinent, because the social network is shaping up against Google, and the “enemy of my enemy” adage is getting plenty of airtime alongside Steve Jobs's famous declaration that he would wage “thermonuclear war” against Google.

Several of Apple's WWDC announcements show gunsights coming to bear on Google. The company is already involved in numerous patent suits aimed at Android's partner ecosystem, but Apple is now ready to attack Google's core business. Google Maps, for example, is gone, replaced with Apple Maps. And much attention is on Siri, now present in iPads and possibly coming to your dashboard - Apple has forged integration deals with car manufacturers.

Apple wants users to initiate interaction - search, social networking, navigation, communication - through Siri. And while Siri uses Google Search as a source of data - for now - that's a knife aimed directly at Google's heart, targeting Google's services and mobile ad revenue.

Google has plenty of ammunition of its own to fight back, with Android growing market share and maturing services and apps. It's also possible that a war of attrition between Google and Apple could weaken both, opening opportunities for Microsoft, which hasn't gained much traction with Windows Phone yet but is clearly in for the long game.

Steve Jobs might be gone, but his legacy of pushing design to the limits, and his threats to go thermonuclear on Google, lived on at WWDC 2012.