Today was on one of Steve Jobs’ celebrated keynote addresses, and as the Mac faithful always hopes, it featured a flurry of new product announcements. Some of the more ambitious rumors remain just that for now, but to be honest, I wasn’t that excited about any of them anyway. Instead Jobs announced an iPod FM receiver/wired remote (which is cool, but it still plugs in on the freaking bottom, which would annoy me if I had one of the latest iPods), an Intel-powered iMac (same as the old one, just with Intel inside) and the MacBook Pro (sounds like a scottish PowerBook, and doesn’t look all that different from the previous generation). All of that was cool, but nothing too exciting for me.
I was however, quite excited about the latest version of iLife. I’ve bought every previous version of iLife (and blogged about ‘04 and ‘05), but my motivation every year is just to get the latest incremental iPhoto (and to a lesser extent, iDVD) release. Finally (finally), Apple’s decided to address the big weakness in both their software suite and their .Mac service with iWeb. iWeb basically replaces the craptacular HomePage web-based app on .Mac, and makes it simple to share photos, create blogs and podcasts and more. It is everything I’ve wanted ever since I first discovered how limited iPhoto’s HomePage features are. And since that’s pretty much why I use .Mac to begin with (see my .Mac page…it’s all photos!), this is a big deal for me.
So yeah, I’m going to run out and get iLife ‘06. I already tried today after work (the benefits to working a block away from an Apple Store), but they didn’t have it yet. I’ll probably again try tomorrow. Once I have it, I’ll have to completely overhaul my .Mac site. I’m not sure if I’m going to dabble in Photocasting, but you never know. I love the fact that it uses good ol’ RSS for everything. We’ll see…stay tuned.
Oooh, looks like TypeKey integration is well and truly fixed – congrats on that, it’s held me off from posting for quite a while.
A few comments on the Stevenote – I’m now a fully paid-up Mac user (got myself a well-loaded 15″ PowerBook a few months ago, along with an iSight and .mac):
The iPod receiver/remote was always going to have to plug in the bottom of the unit – the Nano and Video don’t have the old remote connector. In some ways, this is a good thing, as it allows the receiver to show a nice GUI through the dock connector. As you’ve said though, it does suck in quite a few ways.
The Intel iMac is quite an interesting beast, I think – it’s got enough graphics horsepower to be a reasonable Windows gaming machine, hopefully decent DVR functionality isn’t too far away, and with a decent-sized HD, it’ll serve as a nice central machine for a media-driven home network. The paltry 512Mb of RAM is a slight insult, but then it is a consumer-grade machine, so I’m not massively surprised. The only big question I’ve got is, will it run Windows, or have Apple or Microsoft (intentionally or otherwise) done something to prevent this?
At the moment, my PC is used almost solely for gaming (I boot up the MSDN previews of Windows Vista once in a while, to see how much of it is broken), and I’d gladly ditch it for a 20″ iMac. I suspect the Radeon X1600 is somewhat underpowered, but it looks like it might well be able to hold its own against my current X800 Pro. The uncertainty over which model of X1600 (Pro or XT are the only versions I can find commercially) is something of an issue as well.The MacBook Pro is indeed a fairly silly name, but I’m sure it’ll grow on me. Part of me feels that I should be angry that my only-released-in-mid-October PowerBook is now obsolete (or at least, nowhere near as high-end as it was), but I’m slightly wary of the Intel move until it’s proven. For a second machine, or a machine that uses mostly built-in apps, it’s fine, but I use Delicious Library, Shiira and a host of other random bits and pieces that aren’t Universal Binaries yet on my PowerBook, and I wouldn’t give them up. The performance of of the MacBook is understandably a lot higher, but they’re more expensive and once you factor in a 7200rpm HD (the single biggest performance boost I’ve found for a machine) and 1Gb of RAM, you’re into seriously heavy money.
I’m actually very happy with my PowerBook, although the extra power would be welcome. I’m also slightly nervous that Apple don’t seem to have published battery life specs yet. Finally on the MacBook, the power connector looks like an absolutely genius move.iLife ‘06 does look interesting – I’ve found iPhoto to be slow to use, even with a mere 35 photos. GarageBand is something I’d like to play around with more, but Ableton seems to suit my needs far better. If only I could get those jam packs out of Garageband and into something else. iWeb could be great, but the (supposed?) inability to edit or supplement the built-in templates is something of a concern. I’d really like something that I can get up and running quickly on, and then dig gradually deeper into and customise. That doesn’t seem to be the Apple way, though.
I’m not sure why Apple don’t allow i[Work/Life] to be bought online and downloaded, but then it’s a big download, and burning backup copies etc may be an issue. It’s something I’d like to see, though – it would be nice to have the keynote say “this is available right now”, and jump straight on to Apple.com and get the new software. I suspect they’d gain quite a few impulse purchases from it.Eeek, this was a long comment.
Welcome back. I apologize for the broken comments…I managed to screw up a lot of things a while back when I upgraded my MT installation.
Apple has said that they’re not going to take any steps to prevent people from loading Windows onto their Intel boxes, so all that’s needed is windows drivers for the Apple-designed motherboards and other harddware. It won’t take long for that to happen, and I fully expect to see OS loaders (with dual boot capability) in the relatively near future.
Regarding digital software downloads, that functionality *was* going to be built into Software Update…people even dug up images of the interface that were accidentally left in. For whatever reason, they never did anything with it.
Hey, no need to apologise – it’s your site, and commenting on it is a privilege rather than a right!
I think, as soon as there are Windows drivers for the iMac, I’ll be hassling my bank for more credit. They’re lovely machines, and my little Shuttle box is starting to really get noisy after a couple of years of overwork.
BTW, speaking of dual-booting (in this case Linux and OSX), do you know of any non-destructive partition resizers that can deal with HFS+ format? I’d love to get Ubuntu or Gentoo up and running on my PowerBook, but I don’t really want to do a format-and-reinstall. Something like a Mac port of Partition Magic would be fanstastic…
One of the Mac linux ports probably has one, but I don’t know of anything yet.
Dual booting is too cool of a concept…I’m sure there are already people working on ways to do it.