“Can’t innovate, my ass”

I think that quote (courtesy Phil Schiller at last night’s WWDC) represents a growing annoyance within Apple towards the continuing (and often nonsensical) writeups that have been circling the online world for some time. Frankly, it was a little surprising — Apple is known to take digs at competition, much like anyone else — but we don’t often see a statement of annoyance within their presentations, which is what this sounded like.

Image: Techcrunch

I get it too. Apple is a cash cow that sits on top of the smartphone and tablet market today and it seems almost ‘in’ to write negatively about the company. Fair enough, everyone’s always entitled to their opinion, but last night showed that it had severely scaled up, that even Apple is getting tired and annoyed by it.

But there was also a distinct Apple way in which they decided to respond. Apple iterated a focus on design principles, with a lot of context around the “Designed by Apple in California” tagline, and a rather lovely video (which is available on the same page). They took that a step further with the naming of the next version of OS X, Mavericks.

I think the star of the show — even if the most popular item was iOS 7 — was the Mac Pro. My first impression its first look was that the Mac Pro looked like a little nuke silo for your desk (perhaps that’s what they were going for), but to cram all of that in something that is 1/8th the volume of the current edition, that is some incredible work.

Image: Apple

This year, the rumor mill, while existant was far from explosive, with the only news coming out with any guarantee being that iOS was porting a flat design, the Mac Pro line would be updated and possible SDKs to Apple TV (which didn’t actually happen). Suffice to say TIm Cook’s insistance on doubling down on secrecy seems to have worked, for the most part.

There were also a few (indirect) digs at Scott Forstall and his reign — almost like the engineers were finally able to breathe again — with the changes to the design elements in both OS X Mavericks and iOS 7, and the overall loss of skeuomorphism.

Oh, and how cool was that anki demo?

For those of you who have a couple hours to kill, the full keynote is here.