More of my sites

WinInfo Daily News
SuperSite for Windows
Windows IT Pro Magazine
Connected Home
Thurrott Dot Com
Windows Weekly at TWIT

About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

MacWorld 2006 Stevenote Overview

As expected, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wowed the home crowd again with another Macworld keynote address. But what did he really say? And how important are the products and services he discussed? As always, I provide a recap, along with grades.

Retail stores. Jobs noted that the Apple retail stores posted their first $1 billion quarter, while hosting 26 million visitors during the holiday 2005 selling season. There are 135 Apple Stores around the world. Grade: A

iPod. Apple didn't release any new iPod devices at Macworld, though the company did (finally) announce an FM tuner for $49. This functionality should simply be built into the iPod, and probably will be after Apple analyzes sales of the add-on. Grade: n/a

iTunes. The most popular music service adds more content, including bowl games, SNL skits, and so on. Apple has sold over 8 million TV show episodes since October 2005 and is selling over 1 billion songs per year. My take is that these are tremendous numbers for Apple, but that the quality of the songs and videos Apple are selling is second-rate and unacceptable for true lovers of this media. Grade: B

Aperature. Apple's high-end RAW picture editor is touted as "Final Cut Pro" for photos. There have been many reports of problems, and of course Adobe is big in this market as well. I have no hands-on experience with Aperature, so I can't say. Grade: n/a

Dashboard widgets. Jobs noted that there are now over 1500 widgets for Dashboard, a component of Mac OS X 10.4.x, which is highly derivative of products such as Konfabulator. That's nice, and many are of high quality, but Apple needs to free these beasties from that weird pseudo-desktop of Dashboard and let them live on the normal Mac desktop. Grade: C

Mac OS X 10.4.4. Jobs announced a new version of Mac OS X today, version 10.4.4, which is a free upgrade for Tiger users. Version 10.4.4 adds new Dashboard gadgets. Grade: n/a

iLife '06. Apple's best-of-breed digital media suite just got better. Apple iLife '06 includes a dramatically improved iPhoto (with new one-click effects, calendar purchasing, and photocasting support, and more), a new iMovie HD (with animated themes, real time effects [finally], and more), a new iDVD HD (with widescreen menus, Magic iDVD, new themes, and more), a new Garageband with podcast support, and a brand new application called iWeb that lets you share photos, movies, music, blogs, and other content on the Web. Apple's iWeb utilizes Microsoft's AJAX technology, which allows Web applications to more closely resemble desktop apps. iLife '06 still costs $79, which is a bargain. Grade: A+

.Mac. Apple's .Mac service now has over 1 million subscribers, which isn't tremendous frankly, and is better integrated with iLife '06. Grade: B-

iMac (Intel version). Apple's first Intel-based Mac features an Intel Core Duo processor (which is designed for notebooks) and yet is 2 to 3 faster than the iMac G5, which used a desktop-based PowerPC G5 microprocessor. (This kind of puts Apple's previous performance claims in perspective, I guess.) Anyway, the new iMac uses exactly the same case and design as the previous version and still comes in the same 17- and 20-inch form factors and at the same prices as the G5 versions. It's shipping today. Grade: A

Microsoft support. Microsoft reports that it is well down the path to Universal Binary support, which will let its applications run natively on Intel-based Macs. The company promises to support Mac Office for at least five more years. I'm not sure why it's necessary to announce that, but there you go. Grade: A

MacBook Pro. Apple couldn't shoehorn a G5 chip into a PowerBook, so Apple went Intel and is now dropping their PowerBook line for the new Intel Core Duo-based MacBook Pro. This notebook features a 15.4-inch widescreen display, is extremely thin, and has a built-in iSight camera, IR sensor, and remote. In other words, it's a lot like Core Duo-based PC notebooks: Faster, thinner, and quieter than the PowerBooks. It's not shipping today, but you can order it now and then spend the next month praying for it to arrive. The bad news? They're expensive. A 1.67 GHz version is $1999, while the 1.83 GHz model is a whopping $2499. Grade: B+

Overall, there were no surprises at all: Apple introduced virtually every single product that people had expected (aside from new iPods), but did so with the usual flair and swagger that have exemplified this company since Jobs has returned. On that note, the keynote was not disappointing, largely because Apple didn't disappoint with products that didn't match the rumor mill. On the other hand, none of this is exciting enough to overshadow CES, as I had predicted. Overall Grade: B+

By the way, I'd also like to note that I attempted to catch up with live news updates from the keynote on various Mac- and iPod-related Web sites. Most of them came up lame, with crashing sites and script errors. The best of the lot, by far, and the one updated most quickly, was Mac Rumors, at MacRumorsLive.com. Nice jobs, guys.

[ Posted at 1:45 PM | Permalink ]