A couple modest surprises, to me anyway:

- SD slot on the 13" and 15" MacBooks. About time! Given how most cameras these days have standardized on SD, from tiny point-and-shoots up to some of the D-SLRs, it's just an obvious feature that's been missing forever. This also means that people will be able to add assorted gadgets via the SD slot (e.g., a cellular modem). Hey, if they can do the Eye-Fi, they should be able to do all sorts of other things.

- Firewire 800, standard. Seems like the rumors of FW's death have been somewhat exaggerated.

- Tom Tom on the iPhone -- I wouldn't count on it being available before I'm heading to attend a wedding in France in July, but this will definitely have an impact on the portable GPS market.

- Otherwise, the new iPhone doesn't really scream that it's all that much of an upgrade over the current iPhone beyond the improvements in battery life. At least, it's unclear that I'd ever notice a difference in my daily life if my 3G were to be replaced with a 3GS. Of course, I'm not exactly a power user.

(The single best thing Apple could do to improve my life with my iPhone is to do caching properly with the browser, such that when you open a new pane, do some surfing, and come back, it doesn't have to re-render the page from scratch. This could certainly be done without requiring new hardware.)

- Interesting that Apple now supports remote wipe and other such "enterprise" features that Blackberry people have always taken for granted. It will be interesting to see whether you can do this without requiring a MobileMe subscription. Presumably, the iPhone wakes up once in a while and pings a server with its serial number to ask "gee, anything I need to know here?" You should be able to configure any old web server to serve that purpose.

(Evil thought: go to a conference, hook into the public Wi-Fi, and watch for these phone-home messages. If you see one, what are the odds they did the crypto properly? If they screwed it up, then you could respond with the kill signal. You could cause a whole lot of grief.)

- Any one of the changes to Snow Leopard would be no big deal, but the sum of all of them is definitely a big deal. One notable feature is that you can run your machine as a file server but have it stay asleep until it actually gets a request. I've been pondering doing Wake-on-LAN from my iPhone or something, but this will make it painless.

- ZFS seems to have disappeared from the Snow Leopard Server pages. Old text:
Quote:
For business-critical server deployments, Snow Leopard Server adds read and write support for the high-performance, 128-bit ZFS file system, which includes advanced features such as storage pooling, data redundancy, automatic error correction, dynamic volume expansion, and snapshots.
New text: completely absent.