AppleTV SDK being postponed yet again was a terrible shame for the event, leaving a huge hole in the lineup. AppleMusic has nothing to do with WWDC and I could be totally wrong, but my bet is it was supposed to have its own special event and was pushed into the keynote to fill the huge gap.
If you think about it, why would Apple launch a music streaming service at a developers conference? It has zero to do with software development.
As a 20+ year commercial music radio DJ, I think the concept is lame anyway. It really offers very little that isn't out there already and a 24 hour live jock radio station to me is a total waste of time and money. Reinventing the 90s. As for new music, there just won't be the time nor the appeal to feature even 0.01% of unsigned artists on the shows.
Apple iTunes radio launched many months ago and it’s just a rebrand of that which is struggling against Spotify and Pandora. Those guys even offer a free tier. This is to try to convince Wall Street the acquisition of Beats for $3 Billion was a good buy. It wasn’t. The recorded music/commercial radio model is dead, live performance (and a few artists selling out to corporate sponsorship) will be the only real way to make money out of music.
ApplePay is having trouble signing up retailers in the US and anecdotally I hear have been pretty hard-sell in trying to get companies to accept the system. There's little appetite for ApplePay at the moment as it’s just another method of card payment but I’m not writing it off as I think it has big potential. It also has a big nemesis in Google's own NFC payment product.
Next OS X version looks fantastic - incremental improvements but there’s a big improvement in the low level graphics engine with Metal pumping bits directly into the GPU. Very nice indeed.
Apple News is Flipboard. Interesting revenue model and better than the Facebook effort but it relegates big name news mastheads to mere content companies.
This is a serious challenge for them. Ignore it and risk being made redundant, go with Apple and lose control of the traditional readership flow and hence revenue potential. Also say goodbye to classifieds forever - formerly the rivers of gold, but still the rivers of bronze.
Apple Watch can never be a mainstream product without its own cellular radio module. Power is a very serious issue already and especially will be if they put an LTE chip on board. I hear sales fell off a cliff after the initial rush and is mostly an uber-geek toy. When it does get its own cellular access however, it becomes a big contender. I still won't be using the Watch SDK any time soon.
Swift is the only real highlight of the whole thing and for me it’s enormous. Open sourcing it is an absolutely brilliant move and is yet another wakeup call for Microsoft. It's already a very interesting language but getting it on linux will send it to the moon. What’s missing for the Internet of things is a modern language which compiles. Javascript/Node is cool on the new breed of ARM microcontrollers, and Python is OK but both are still interpreted. Google will be annoyed too as they try to get Go into the mainstream; at least they have a great product on the client with AngularJS.
Swift feels like C/C++ brought into the 21st Century and without the arcane syntax and pitfalls for ordinary coders. I will still use C/C++ for most serious stuff but I can see lots of people turning to Swift now the compiler is open; maybe on the server side too. I think I'll convert some older ObjectiveC code into Swift 2.0 in the next few weeks and will update you on how it feels on a really meaty project.
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