iLife, iWork, 17 inch MBP’s and oh yeah, DRM free iTunes
Today MacWorld keynote was quite likely the worst in apple history. It is now obvious why Steve Jobs didn’t bother showing up, he was afraid he would fall asleep giving the presentation.
I will give Phil some credit, he is a great speaker, and he did manage to get the crowd worked up over several of the features in the newest versions of iLife and the new threat to Google, iWork. Really, though, neither of these products are worthy of headlining what was the most prominent of Mac days in the year.
Phil spent over an hour discussing these two pieces of software, which is more time then the original release of OS X got, and there are some really cool features which we will cover in detail later.
The new MacBook Pros, which I don’t think should be considered as new since they are just upgrades to an existing line of laptops. While these are obviously awesome machines, they’re are some glaring issues.
One major problem, no removeable battery. Seriously?!? I realize they are touting an eight hour battery life, but I still want to have the ability to carry an extra battery with me and switch them out. It also lasts 1000 charges, which is about 3 years. Now, the laptop I am writing this post on is 4.5 years old and on it’s second battery … so I guess I will a process to go through to replace the battery in a few years.
Also an issue is the lack of a glare free screen … These high end MacBooks are not going to be used by people who want to watch DVD’s, some of us want to do real work on them, in coffee shops, and offices with windows during the day … I guess that will be a thing of the past.
The “one last thing”, was iTunes. iTunes finally adopts a DRM free platform, and bring iTunes to 3G instead of forcing wifi. Both of these things are very very cool, but also very very late. This all should have been a part of the iPhone 3G release last year. DRM Free had to come, but I am not sure it came in time to salvage iTunes place as leader in music sales, from competitors like Amazon and Walmart that have been selling DRM Free for some time now.
In the end, todays keynote seemed to be a waste of two hours, and dissapointed many. Since this is the last MacWorld that Apple will attend, I was really hoping that they would have made more of an event rather then pushing out a random marketing exec, and leaving us with little more then a software update.
