MacWorld Announcments
January 16th, 2005I still haven’t gotten around to watching the entire keynote online, but I’m pretty excited about the annoucements. Between the Mac mini, the iPod shuffle and a better preview of MacOS Tiger – it’s another good year to be a Mac guy.
Mac mini
By far, this was the biggest news of the day. Until now, the closest thing Apple has ever had to an entry-level computer has been the eMac. But $799 is still a big number in people’s minds, especially when they’re making the big leap to a new operating system. The $499 Mac mini should be a big hit. For folks who love how their $299 iPod works, it’s not a wild stretch of the imagination to think they’d pay $499 for their whole computing life to work that way as well.
it’s a shame it’s not a G5, but a 1ghz G4 with firewire, usb and a combo drive probably suits most folks needs. You’ll be able to hook up your usb printer, your digital camera and your digital camcorder. It’s an inexpensive means for people to run Apple’s iLife software.
Sure, if you get a loaded mini with Superdrive, lots of ram, Bluetooth and wireless, you’re paying more than you would for an iMac. And that’s the point. If you don’t need everything the iMac is, the mini is a good fit for you. If you want a G5 and a sweet flat screen, get the iMac. I’m still eyeballing a dual 2ghz G5 myself.
iPod Shuffle
Though I have no real need for one of these, I can see myself buying one. I use my 20GB iPod for a lot of things during the week. I shuttle work between home and the office, I use Pod2Go to get movie times, weather and keep my Stickies notes handy. I keep a directory of internet bookmarks on my iPod so I have them wherever I go.
But when I’m running around town by myself for a few horus, it would be handy to shuffle some music with something the size of a stick of gum. It doesn’t have a display, but it doesn’t much matter. It would either be filled with an audiobook or a few hours of IDM tunes.
iLife ’05
I didn’t think much of this annoucement until I started looking at the details of the new features. Checkout these pages on Apple’s site for a better idea of what’s new in ’05.
- iMovie ’05 – Magic iMovie
- iPhoto ’05 – Advanced Editing Tools
- iDVD ’05 – Set Scene Markers
- GarageBand ’05 – Musical Notation
iWork ’05
Apple must figure that they’ve got enough momentum now that they can risk really pissing off Microsoft. Such is life. While MS Office 2004 is the best version MS has ever shipped, it’s still bloatware as far as most users are concerned. If Pages is a lightweight, flexible word processor than can make it easy to make vanilla documents look a bit more professional, you can count me in.