My Great MacWorld Adventure Day 2: The Keynote

I am certain that you have all heard of the top Apple news from the Steve Jobs Keynote. I wanted to go over the details of the announcements and give you my take on them. The press pass I had was not a guarantee to get into the Keynote; we were placed in a press overflow room with closed circuit feeds.

I am going to start with the big announcement and that was the iPod Shuffle. It has two modes: shuffle and playlist. With no screen, the playlist mode allows you to go through a CD or list of pre-arranged music. The iPod Shuffle has a USB 2 connection and software built into iTunes which allows you to create a space on the iPod to act like a flashdrive. You can store files and play your music. It comes with a 12 hour rechargeable battery and has built in auto-fill in iTunes to allow you to pick the songs you need to fill the iPod. The size options are 512 meg for $99 and 1 gig for $149.

But the most exciting piece of news was the Mac mini. Think of the possibilities. This is the first Mac sold at this low of a price point, but the real news is the size. It’s no larger than a box of cigars and weighs only 2.9 pounds! It comes with a slot loading Combo Drive, (CD, CD-R, DVD) FireWire, USB 2, Modem, ethernet and the option to add up to 1 gig of RAM and an Airport card or Bluetooth. The pricing is $499 for the 1.25 GHz, G4 with a 40 gig hard drive, and $599 for the 1.42 GHz G4 with an 80 gig Hard drive. Until you have one in your hand, it’s hard to imagine the size. It will be available in stores and online on Jan 22nd and come with Mac OS X and the new iLife 05.

Let’s jump back to the beginning and go over the rest of the announcements. Steve Jobs started by telling us the latest Apple sales figures. There are now 101 Apple retail stores with 1 million visitors a week. The iMac was the most popular Mac sold in the first quarter since its release. OS X now has 12,000 applications with over 14 million active users. Tiger will be released in the first half of 2005.

Tiger will have over 200 new features but Steve talked about only a few of them today. Spotlight is the built-in search tool that searches your e-mail, files, photos, mp3s, documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs for any expression. What makes it special is that unlike Google or MSN search, it is built into the OS and all the applications of the OS - that includes system preferences, finder, and more. Plus the fact that developers can build it into any of the applications they create.

The new Mail application allows you to search all mailboxes, including attached photos and files with one single query. The new Quicktime 7 will support High Def DVD and the new 264 Codex. Its program Dashboard has tons of built-in widgets including dictionary and conversion, which are all eloquent and must be seen to be believed. Apple’s new iChat now has audio conferencing with up to ten people and video conferencing with up to four people using the Quicktime new codex. It was a smooth and impressive demo.

Apple then announced Final Cut Express for HD. It will charge $299 or $99 for an upgrade available in February. iLife 05 will be out on January 22nd and contain a new iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie and Garageband, plus the latest iTunes.

iPhoto is a major upgrade with better organization, more formats, better editing,and the ability to use mpeg4 movies in iPhoto. One of the new formats that the new iPhoto supports is RAW. The new books available for ordering off of iPhoto has expanded to soft cover options with a sweet new pocket book for $3.99.

iMovie is also faster with more effects and transitions. Apple also added a Magic iMovie all-in-one button that will make a movie straight from your camera with transitions and titles. The big news is that now you will be able to edit HD movies in iMovie, while iDVD has 15 new themes and a one-step DVD creation utility. They now support all DVD formats. Finally, Garageband has added orchestra instruments to its jam packs and now supports 8 track recording with realtime music notation and vocal transformations. iLife will be priced at $79 on January 22nd.

Apple then announced the new iWork package, which contains Keynote 2 and the new program, Pages. Keynote 2 now has themes, animated text, presenter display and Flash, Quicktime, or PDF output. The new Pages program is a word processor and desktop publisher combination. It contains 40 Apple-designed templates that can be manipulated with a simple mouse click to suit your needs. Pages will be PDF, Word, and Appleworks compatible and be available in iWork on Jan 22nd for $79.00.

All in all I was very satisfied in the announcements, but we expect more than Apple can deliver. The products are cutting edge and will help Apple to keep its stock price high and its shareholders happy. Can it keep its fans and customers happy? We’ll have to wait and see.