Legions of the tech-savvy flocked to Cupertino, California today like Dorothy and friends traveling the Yellow Brick road to Oz to find out what CEO Tim Cook and the team had up their his sleeve this time. With murmurs of 5S and 5C, not much was due to change, but folks showed up and logged on in droves to get the news of the latest products to don the iconic bitten apples logo. With all the rumors of a lower-end plastic version and even a fully gold-encased version, the announcements were a bit closer to the chest, tinkerings with earlier versions and a reason to have a bunch of people over for a show.
Highlights from the announcements included talks of the latest operating system, IOS 7, which Craig Federigh, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering said would “quickly become the world’s most popular operating system” and included a new home and lock screen as well as a swipe feature from the bottom of the phone that brings up a new control center. Siri got a male voice upgrade and ability to do Wikipedia searches. Playing on the Instagram craze, the camera will feature built-in features and new ways to group your pictures by year/location. As one of the nearly 200 new features in IOS 7 has to be iTunes Radio, which premieres on the new operating system available for free September 18 that Federigh described as “getting a whole new device.”