Mark Lyn­der­say

The keynote ad­dress at this year's World­wide De­vel­op­er Con­fer­ence found Ap­ple in a cu­ri­ous place. The com­pa­ny is mak­ing in­sane amounts of mon­ey, but its share price has dropped over the last few months, and the dead­liest word in the world for Ap­ple has been mut­tered more of­ten late­ly. That word, of course, is stale.

In the last three months, Black­ber­ry, along with the de­vel­op­ment ax­es of Nokia/Mi­crosoft and Sam­sung/Google An­droid have field­ed strong con­tenders in the smart­phone mar­ket that have be­gun to make Ap­ple's five-year-old iOS UI start to look, well, dat­ed.

A re­freshed op­er­at­ing sys­tem for its phones and tablets, iOS ver­sion 7 grabbed a lot of time on stage and that's hard­ly sur­pris­ing. WWDC sold out in 71 sec­onds this year and many of those de­vel­op­ers are keen to get a slice of the con­sid­er­able pie that Ap­ple has been shar­ing out to the tune of US$10 bil­lion since the App store opened to serve its phones and iPad de­vices.

Oth­er an­nounce­ments checked box­es that the com­pa­ny seemed to be ig­nor­ing while of­fer­ing up some juice in the mu­sic mar­ket seg­ment where it does well.

The ar­rival of iTunes Ra­dio is more of a pre­emp­tive strike than a busi­ness ini­tia­tive for Ap­ple. It's nev­er been keen about get­ting in­to the stream­ing mu­sic busi­ness, but it can't ig­nore the suc­cess of Spo­ti­fy and Rdio, so the new ser­vice is re­al­ly about keep­ing stream­ing mu­sic fans in the iTunes soft­ware ecosys­tem that un­der­pins its lu­cra­tive hard­ware sales.

It's US on­ly, but the mu­sic li­cens­ing arrange­ments that have blocked ac­cess to both Spo­ti­fy and Rdio lo­cal­ly sug­gest that we won't be stream­ing any iTunes mu­sic any­time soon.

But the re­al­ly big news at the de­vel­op­er con­fer­ence was hard­ware.

Not a new iPhone or iPad, which get all the love, but new Macs.

The biggest sur­prise of the event was the new Mac Pro, the ab­solute zenith of the com­pa­ny's com­put­ing hard­ware. Ap­ple doesn't sell many of these units rel­a­tive to its tablets and phones, but the peo­ple who use these im­pos­ing tow­ers are in­flu­en­tial cre­atives who need the most pow­er­ful iron. They al­so haven't been hap­py for years now.

The new Mac Pro isn't an up­grade bone tossed to those pow­er users. It's a rad­i­cal re­think­ing of what a pro­fes­sion­al tow­er might look like, as rad­i­cal in its way as the NeXT Cube was in its day.

What it re­al­ly looks like is the un­holy love child of Darth Vad­er and R2D2 and it's a con­tin­u­a­tion of Ap­ple's dri­ve to­ward min­i­mal­ism and a pur­er mar­riage of form and func­tion in its de­vices.

The de­vice known as a Mac Pro has shrunk from an im­pos­ing box with a men­ac­ing cheese grater front face in­to a pol­ished black alu­mini­um cylin­der an eighth of its for­mer size that runs up to 2.5x faster.

Cur­rent Mac Pro users will quick­ly re­alise that Ap­ple has flung every­thing else out­side the um, cylin­der. The com­pa­ny is bet­ting on USB 3 (four ports) and Thun­der­bolt 2 (six ports), now ca­pa­ble of 20GBps trans­fers to con­nect all the stuff that was once stuffed in­to the Mac work­sta­tion box.

The rad­i­cal re­design of the Mac Pro was on­ly one of sev­er­al mes­sages that this WWDC keynote ad­dressed. It wasn't the first such pre­sen­ta­tion since the pass­ing of Steve Jobs, but it's the first to ad­dress spec­u­la­tion about the com­pa­ny's di­rec­tion since then.

So yes, Ap­ple has tak­en note of the con­cerns about its age­ing iOS plat­form, yes, it is of­fer­ing cut­ting edge up­dates to its pop­u­lar Mac­books, yes, it in­tends to meet the needs of its pro­fes­sion­al users, yes, it will up­date Ma­cOS for its com­put­er users and on top of that, yes we can re­turn man­u­fac­tur­ing to the USA, be­gin­ning with the new Mac Pro.

But re­al­ly, it fell to Phil Schiller, the bear-like, gre­gar­i­ous pre­sen­ter of many keynotes to sum up Ap­ple's at­ti­tude with the words, "Can't in­no­vate any­more my ass!"

Read an ex­pand­ed ver­sion of this col­umn here (http://ow.ly/adAll).

WWDC keynote high­lights.

�2 Fifty bil­lion apps on the iOS store have been down­loaded in five years and Ap­ple has paid de­vel­op­ers $10 bil­lion, $5 bil­lion just in the last year.

�2 Ap­ple claims that the Mac­Book is the num­ber one note­book in the US now, out­pac­ing the PC in an­nu­al growth 15 per­cent to 3 per­cent over the last five years. To­tal growth over the last five years: 100 per­cent ver­sus 18 per­cent for the PC.

�2 Skeu­mor­phism is gone in Mac OSX Mav­er­icks. ""Even with­out the stitch­ing, it still sticks to the home­screen," Craig Fed­erighi wry­ly not­ed while demon­strat­ing the new Cal­en­dar app.

�2 "True sim­plic­i­ty is de­rived from so much more than just the ab­sence of clut­ter and or­na­men­ta­tion: It's about bring­ing or­der to com­plex­i­ty," Jony Ive on iOS7 which has at­tract­ed com­par­isons to cur­rent An­droid flavours.

�2 Firewire is dead, long live Thun­der­bolt 2.