Apple MacWorld Keynote — sigh…
Bottom line: Not what the rumor mills anticipated.
No beefy new Mini. No iPhone Nano. No new Ives-sculpted iMac. No Snow Leopard demonstration. No itty bitty Apple netbook. No Apple tablet. No iPhone Grande with a slide-out keypad and video camera.
Those that were hoping for some new hardware geek-out will be surely blogrumbling within the hour.
But there were a few interesting choices made, and we’re wondering whether it means something more than the — dare I say it? — less-than-enchanting Schiller keynote debut seems to convey.
- A strong move away from DRM on music, for the entire collection eventually (8 million songs now, out of 10 million total). It appears the recording industry has capitulated to the inevitable and will bear the burden of explaining the implications to artists, since they’re the ones that are so used to hissy fits. The obvious next step is video, and I’ll bet it happens with DRM-free TV shows next. Then it’ll be a shoot-out with hulu.
- Moving apps to the cloud, with iwork.com. Documents can be uploaded, shared, collaborated on, downloaded. The difference between this and Google Docs is that Google did not have to make its apps look like the desktop versions, exactly. Apple had to make the browser-based app look identical to the desktop iWork app, and they’ve done a pretty good job. Now the question is going to be version control. What are they going to do when the online version moves to iWork 2010 and the user’s got iWork 2009 installed on the desktop? What breaks? And why isn’t all this part of mobileme? Oh, and iWork got some updates. Big whoop. OK, so you can use your iPhone as a Keynote remote now.
- How do you make the laptop significantly better? Apple’s solution is to make an 8 hour battery that will last 5 years before needing replacement. Of course, it’s a whole new manufacturing process, this one having nothing to do with carved aluminum. Oh, and you have to send the laptop in to get the battery replaced, because if you try it, you’ll surely cut the red wire rather than the blue wire and 500,000 people will be vaporized. In the questionable timing category, this advance is only in the new, high-end 17-inch MacBook Pro, which in the current recession will surely draw long lines to plunk down $2800.
- The update to iLife includes several nice implants from hot technology, like face recognition and geosavviness in iPhoto, and stabilization in a completely rebuilt iMovie. This is more in the vein of Steve’s vision that nontext documents are where Apple can make an innovative contribution. (Let those folks in Redmond innovate in the text and numbers arena.) But other than that, it was not the kind of thing you’d spend half a MacWorld keynote on in the past.
Tags: Apple, keynote, LinkedIn, MacWord
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