Apple has sprung!

A group of co-workers and were able to sit in a large conference room and watch hesterday’s Apple event.  I typed furiously to capture my notes and thoughts, while still doing day job activities at the same time.  I am wondering how much the U.S. Economy was impacted by the anticipation of Apple’s announcement,  anyway, a quic recap (that you’ve probably seen on other blogs by now):

• HBO announced their HBO Now offering –  Apple is the exclusive launch partner, and it appears they have a 3 month exclusivity.  This allows customers to pay $14.99 per month (first month free) to get access to all of HBO’s custom content.  This includes The Sopranos, VEEP, and the most important title Game of Thrones.  Personally I think the three month exclusive gives Apple a great boost as it coincides with the latest season of Game of Thrones. 
• Apple dropped the price of the Apple TV To $69 to coincide with the launch.  I believe this is two fold: first, many others have provided credible tv devices (chromcast, fire tv just to name two) and second, Apple is probably clearing the supply chain before they announce a newer product that includes the ability to run apps and games.  That would make a ton of sense to me.
• Apple announced ReseachKit – this open source project will allow researches to collect data from wide groups of people (opt in) and to push surveys, etc. to them greatly exapanding the amount of data that they get for medical and health research.  Key projects have been announced for – Parkinson, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, breast Cancer.  This will change the scale of data collection for researchers and hopefully dramatically improve research.  Partnerships include Stanford university, Sage Bionetworks, Massachusetts General hospital, and Ichan School of Medicine.
• Then Apple surprised me, and many of us in the room with a new MacBook accouncement.  The new 12″ MacBook is using edge to edge screen, a new trackpad, new battery tech, and a new CPu layout.  At only 2lbs, I am looking forward to getting my hands on this device.  The downside is that Apple has continued their all out assault on our wallet with a new adapter, that will required a dongle so that you can extend beyond just the power port.  We joked in the room that you would have an octopus dongle to have all the ports you need.  There are many things to like about this new laptop, but it appears it can only be expanded to 8gb of ram and 500gb SSD.  Not really something that can be used to run VM’s that I need at work, nor the storage I need for my primary machine.

• We then got to the main event – the Apple Watch, to be honest not much new hear from the announcement back in Sept.  The key points for me were: 18 hours battery (under normal usage) and pricing:

• So watch has wifi- and bluetooth so features all work at home without carying the phone…