Macworld and the new Mac explained
Tuesday, January 11th, 2005The annual Macworld conference in San Francisco was held today. As usual Steve Jobs gave his keynote and proved why he’s always been Apple’s best sales person. There were lots of new announcements, here’s my take on them.
Tiger: The new version of OS X, looks nice, but I’m not clamoring for it like I was Jaguar.
Keynote 2: Apple’s presentation software looks great! I used the last Keynote a for a few presentations this year, most notably all my WebCT presentations because of it’s graphing and video features. Looks like it’s only get better. May favourite feature is when you have your PowerBook plugged into the projector your screen has what’s projected, your notes, what’s next, etc. on it. Keynote 2 is part of the iWork packages which comes with Pages, a new version of AppleWorks – which was a horrible program!
iLife ’05: New version of iLife that has a version of iPhoto that can be more than just crop and fix red-eye.
iPod shuffle: The new tinny, affordable, flash-based iPod to take on all the imitators. It was bound to happen.
Last but not least, the Mac Mini. I’ve created a quick flash animation to explain how (I figure) Apple was finally able to make an affordable Mac:
It was about time Apple addressed the price premium of ‘switching’. You provide your own screen and keyboard and mouse (which we all have kicking around) and get this new tinny computer to power it all for around $500. You can expand the RAM and buy third party firewire drives to expand the storage or add a DVD burner (it comes with a CD burner). With the Motorola built G4 long since paid for its development Apple can easily offer something like this desktop with what appears to be iBook/PowerBook parts. A very smart idea.
