Sorry Apple, Looking Cool Won't Save You

Tech pundits aren't exactly swooning over Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference presentation, in which it showed off an iOS revamp, a new streaming music service, and a cylindrical computer. Here's what the nay people are saying:

• Apple really needed a new iOS, and "thanks to these upgrades, the iPhone will be pretty again," writes Rolfe Winkler at the Wall Street Journal. But the core apps are essentially the same, and "plenty of these just aren't very popular with users." In the end, a "hot new paint job" can only do so much. The iPhone "still needs some more horsepower under the hood."

• Farhad Manjoo at Slate agrees. "The company's heart is in design—when it hits a bump in the road, its instinct is to rejigger how its products look." He also points out that "in some places, iOS 7's design is a straight rip-off" of Windows Phone. The motto might as well be "Designed by Apple in California, with an assist from Redmond."
• Apple's stock fell after the announcement, Forbes points out, and analysts say that's because design only gets you so far. Its "online services are lagging more and more behind the state of the art by Google," one developer says. "They have shown Apple's style," a researcher agrees, "but they didn't necessarily stoke any new consumer behavior."

• "I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing," writes Kevin Roose at New York. Apple's new products seem perfectly fine, but "none of them had the X factor that defined early Apple products." These days, it's the Galaxy S4 garnering the "oohs" and "ahs" the iPhone used to.

• Of course, Apple's new Mac Pro was oozing X factor with its sleek cylindrical design, and had plenty under the hood, as the most powerful computer Apple's ever built. But "it also costs thousands of dollars and is way more machine than most people will ever need," CNN points out.

(More Apple stories.)