The admission that MobileMe wasn’t Apple’s finest moment was one. Steve talked about email and calendar syncing as if MobileMe didn’t exist, which it does. By that I feel he is saying “Give us a second chance to get this right and make it really ‘just work’ for you”.

The Reading List and proper tabs in iPad Safari really addresses one critical issue that plagues the iPad – a lack of memory. Honestly, on my Mac, the only programs that use more RAM than Safari are Aperture (I shoot at 12mp RAW) and Photoshop. Browers easily chew up a gig or two of RAM. So on the iPad, every time, just about, I tap on a tab in Safari, it has to reload the page as there presumably wasn’t enough memory to store the contents of it.

The lock screen improvements are incredibly welcome. When I first bought an iPhone, it annoyed me with how tedious it was, compared to a regular flip-phone, to make a call to my wife, who was first in the list on my phone. With my old Motorola, it was: Flip open, press the down button, press the call button. On the iPhone however, it was: Click the home button to wake up the screen, slide to unlock, tap the phone icon, tap on address book, scroll through the list to find the number, tap to select then tap to select which number to call. Six actions, half of them slow, versus three quick ones. Once I’d worked out how to use favourites it was a little faster, however, but it still doesn’t beat my old phone.

In Mac OS X, saved sessions in programs such as Pages has been a feature that people have wanted FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS. This is not a joke. The Sun Solaris terminals at university had this feature before Mac OS X existed and it has taken Apple that long to implement it. They had spaces too with most of the features. Apple is the king of rehashing old, good ideas, or in the case of those ideas that are similar to good features found elsewhere, from other people.

Does anyone else see how ironic full-screen apps are, considering how many times over the years we’ve had to explain to people switching from Windows that Mac OS X isn’t designed in a way that you’d use your apps full-screen?

Versions is brilliant. This is why Apple writes great software – they think about building the features that would be really useful and that they themselves would like and use, just as we would.

Autosave too. I think Apple has to continue in the direction of making software that “just works”. The only problem I worry about is, if something breaks, how readily will we be able to fix it? Where are app sessions stored? In the application’s preferences?

Being a victim of your software’s success can have a different meaning in Apple land. Instapaper and Dropbox are examples – if your idea is too good, if you aren’t bought out by Apple, customer demand will result in Apple creating their own, if not as good, version of your software.

Dropbox emailed me (well, all their customers presumably) straight after the keynote trying to persuade me to upgrade to a paid service with 50-100 GB of storage. While I feel that iCloud will impact them, I’m sure they’ll take advantage of the API for it quickly to build something more advanced for users who want more flexibility and control. This keynote, while it seems on the surface bad for them, could be very good if they see it as an opportunity, such as Instapaper has.

Mission Control looks pretty, but as someone who never got enthusiastic about Exposé and uses the Dock, Cmd Tab + Spotlight for just about everything, I’m not sure I’ll be particularly interested in Mission control without deliberately forcing myself to change habits.

The music matching service is meh. All my music is lossless as my audio gear is high-end and I don’t purchase from the iTunes Store.

It was interesting noting what garnered the most and least applause too. The most went for finally being able to activate and use an iPhone or iPad without a computer. This requirement alone prevented me recommending the iPad to various acquaintances for whom it would be a great device, being that they are computer illiterate. It sure would have been great for my parents. I can’t help wondering what my late father would have made of reading the newspaper and magazines on one.

Ultimately, however, it is interesting to ponder how much we pick the finest details about what we don’t like about the iOS devices, despite the wonder and convenience that they have brought us. As much as we may joke about Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, there is no doubt that he has revolutionised personal computing from a chore to something wonderful that will define our lives as much as electricity did a century ago.

That’s about 8 MB/sec down and 1.2 MB/sec up or so.