Well, Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld was today, and so like every other Mac user out there, I’m going to weigh in with my thoughts on the new stuff.
- iPod shuffle: Kinda cool. Not quite for me, but I like the fact that it directly plugs into a USB port, and for the price, you get a good amount of space. The lack of a screen would drive me nuts, but I think they’ll sell a million of these…it’s a great gift for the MP3-weary.
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iWork: Since when did two apps constitute a suite? And maybe it’s just that I’ve been using Microsoft Word since the dawn of time…but Pages just doesn’t look like a word processor to me…it looks like Preview. Which is probably intentional, but I don’t want my word processor to be pretty, I just want it to well…process words. The price is definitely right, but until they come out with their own counterpart to Excel and/or publisher, it’s a pretty weak looking suite.
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Mac mini: A lot of people are going to look at this and say it’s like a new version of the ‘cube. I was a big fan of the cube (even though I could never justify the purchase of one), and I still think it’s one of the nicest computers ever made, but this is a different animal, methinks. It’s small. I mean, it’s really small. That’s very cool. I think it’d make a very nice (if slightly expensive) HTPC. I also think it they’ll sell a lot to the iPod crowd, although it’s so underpowered, that anyone picking this up expecting to play Doom 3 on it is going to be sorely disappointed. I do take at least a small amount of pride in the fact that my steadily aging G4 is far more powerful than this thing, if only because if that wasn’t the case, I’d hang my head in shame.
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Tiger: What’s to say? Yeah, it has some nifty features, but that’s all just for show. The fact is, as anyone that’s been through this with each new OS X release will tell you, that these incremental upgrades are mandatory. In about three months after its release, practically every app will require Tiger, so any new features are nice extras. Mostly I’ll be buying this because I have to.
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QuickTime 7: Okay, maybe there’s one feature I can’t wait for…I love QuickTime, and QT7 sounds pretty cool. I’m not crazy about the fact that I’m probably going to have to buy both Tiger and QuickTime 7 Pro, but I’ll do it, I’m sure.
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iLife ‘05: Oh Apple, what did I do to deserve this? I’m a big supporter of iLife…I bought both iLife ‘03 and ‘04, and I’m sure I’ll break down and buy ‘05 eventually as well…but jeez…what gives? Okay, it’s nice to see HD support in iMovie, and hopefully this means the filesize limitation’s been removed, but what’s with the lack of dual layer support in iDVD? When I heard they were touting support for more DVD formats, my heart leapt, only to be shot down when I discovered they were talking about DVD+R/RW (which most SuperDrives have supported for years anyway, even if Apple didn’t publicize it). The only reason I could think of for the lack of DVD-DL support is that they’re waiting for the next refresh of the G5 line to introduce dual layer superdrives. And until those come out, they can’t add support for it into iDVD. Hopefully that will just be a patch when it happens eventually, because I’d hate to wait a full year for that to be added in.
All in all, not a bad show at all for new announcements. LaCie announced a really, really cool new DVD±RW/DL drive, although until I can get DL support in iDVD, I’m not going to take that plunge (plus I’m broke, so it’s just as well). And there are a billion and one cool iPod new peripherals, and some other fun stuff as well. So not bad, really. I’ll just have to keep waiting for dual layer support from Apple.
Considering iWork costs $79 it’s not too bad. I suspect the majority of home users don’t ever touch Excel and whatever the heck else comes in Office. I also suspect the only real reason Apple made iWork is because they need something to bundle on iMacs and things like school bulk purchases so the computers will have servicable word processors, without having to pay for an Office license for each of those computers. Well and the fact that AppleWorks just wasn’t really cutting it anymore. Considering Keynote used to retail for more than the entire cost of iWork, it’s not a terrible deal (discounting of course that Keynote was overpriced to begin with :) ).
Yes, they’re missing an Excel counterpart.
But you want a counterpart to Publisher? Umm… Pages is that too if you look. It’s both a word processor and a DTP suite. And if you’ve used Publisher you should know what a horrible, horrible piece of software it is. Pages is perfectly capable of processing words, it’s also capable of creating the nicely designed documents you would be doing in Publisher. It’s about time somebody realised that these are not things which need to be in seperate apps.
As for the Mac mini, it’s faster than my iMac, and the higher-end model is faster than my Powerbook. Both of which are perfectly reasonable machines. With Tiger, even more so. Comparing it to a machine designed to play Doom 3 is incredibly pointless.
I’ve never used a mac before (ok, I bought an OLD one from a garage sale one time for $20 and gave it to someone… circa 1993) I keep trying to come up with reasons and have to stop myself applying for apple credit (I hate credit, if I want it I’ll save up and buy it eventually etc) – I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’ve even measured the top of my pc and it would fit perfectly, found a kvm (keyboard video monitor) switch that works with usb… I also want to add a superdrive to the $499 version but it’d probably be stupid since it’s so low end (40gig hdd, 256MB, cpu is fine making dvds will simply take longer to encode etc.) I want to break through but will have to wait 3-4 months to save up and justify the cost… so I’m thinking just wait for tiger and hopefully the mac mini will ship with it.