Just some quick reactions to the Macworld Expo announcements.
iTunes. Well, Apple didn’t announce a new Mac Mini with a 9400M GPU, and it didn’t announce a new bigger or cheaper or somehow more compelling AppleTV. And it didn’t announce any new iPods or iPhones. But the iTunes announcement is probably going to turn out to be more significant than anything else — see the second item:
- New pricing model. $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29 per song. This is not “pay more for 256 kbps”, but allowing Music labels to charge more for new shiny stuff and less for back catalogue.
- Everything is going to be DRM free. (8M songs now; 10M soon.) In other words, the recording industry idiots have finally gotten a clue.
- iPhone can now download music over cellular networks (not just Wi-Fi).
It doesn’t say whether our existing purchases will be stripped of their DRM though. I hope that devil is in the details.
The 17″ Macbook Pro looks great. I won’t buy one. When I get a notebook I’ve learned that its single most compelling feature is being small. (As small as possible without becoming dysfunctional.) There’s a perfect MacBook for me already, and it’s the new MacBook Air (which Apple quietly upgraded to the nVidia 9400M sometime in the last couple of months). Oh, and the new 17″ MacBook Pro has a non-removable battery which, apparently, gives you 8h (if you don’t use the faster GPU), and has a 5y lifespan — 1000 charge cycles — but, as already mentioned, isn’t removable.
iWork ’09 looks very compelling. The key missing features appear to have all been added (except for automatic indexing in Pages and perhaps pivot options in Numbers). It would be nice if Apple released a Tables database component but I guess that would make Filemaker’s Bento look silly. Wait, it already looks silly.
I wonder why Apple didn’t try to integrate Google documents into iWork rather than or instead of doing iWork.com. Do they really expect iWork.com to become a major profit center? If not, why not simply leverage something very good that does much the same thing that happens to be something Google is doing as a loss leader. iWork.com could be great, but how much better than Google docs will it have to be to make up for not being free?
iLife ’09 looks equally compelling. I’m one of the people who happens to like iMovie ’08 (I think we’re the silent majority). If you want to create an actual movie, iMovie ’08 is hopeless (mainly owing to poor audio functionality), but then so is iMovie ’06 (for much the same reasons). For cutting together a bunch of footage into something halfway decent in nothing flat, iMovie ’09 looks like it will let us have our cake and eat it. If the face recognition stuff in iPhoto ’09 is halfway decent it will be a huge, huge feature. Music lessons in GarageBand seem like a killer feature, but it really depends on how well it’s done.