MacWorld SF 09 — The last reaction
I thought it was a solid presentation for mostly consumer level information. Very happy about the direction as a stockholder!
Some of iLife stuff is kind of over the top for a lot of folks. The iPhoto improvements are immensely cool and will appeal to everyone. Too bad I use Aperture. The iMovie features sound amazing but doubtful that average consumer can grok or will be drawn to the app. Does it work with the Flip? or the Kodak usb video corder?
iWork == iWhatever to me. It’s a very nice set of tools, I just don’t need them. I also don’t really need Office. I use excel now and then or word to open a client file now and then but for production or billing? No. Mostly OpenOffice suffices for what I do. I love Keynote but our conference budgets are gone for this fiscal year AND the next (in other words, don’t plan on travel buckwheat!). Why will people pay to post their slides/presentations when you can do it for free? MacTards admission only? Seriously. Has anyone at Apple been to slideshare.com? It’s called “good enough” for most people. But yeah, Apple is not a startup and they have to wash off the sting of the borked .Mac launch and Steve Balmer saying “Apple just doesn’t get the internet or isn’t playing” comments.
17″ MBP — amazing specs but I’ll eat my shoe if someone manages to get 8 hours of battery life doing anything real the entire time. I usually do have to replace my laptop batteries but I buy the whole “it’s a design decision to save weight and space” stuff they were shilling (schilling? shillering?).
I’m hugely What The FUCK!!! about no further hardware announcements.
The tower is a year old, the mini older still and there’s still that gaping wound of no mini-tower. Portable is great, I get it, people are buying; but, I’ll wager they are leaving a lot on the table by not addressing this market. There’s powerful new laptops but they can’t touch a desktop and the only desktop that’s meant to be powerful is stupid for most who need the processing power but not all the card slots and most of the other expansion. The current tower is a performance beast. My friend went to handbrake something for me that my machine (late 2005 MBP) was going to take 2.5 hours for and he walked back over 15 minutes later telling me to get on IM. DVD rip and compressed to 2.06 GB in 15 minutes. Wow. But guess what? None of the extra slots will ever be filled, only one of the extra drive bays will ever be filled, and only 1/2 the RAM slots will ever need to be used. it’s time to address this market properly.
The Mini is a living room darling, media server in disguise, low cost computers The Rest of Us can buy to use in our offices and homes, and, a wonderful little form factor that fits into all manner of exhibit halls and other situations, even ones with lots of MSFT $$.
The hardware announcements have to come, it’s just a part of being a computer company … I just wanted them at MWSF so I could upgrade my Mini which serves as my media hub, and, my home desktop which is an original dual 2ghz G5. Ouch!