Bye Bye Baby said:
The thing that convinces me is the observation about the keynote address. He went on forever about iLife and iWork that really was a lot of crap. I was disappointed with the keynote. He gave the impression that he was plugging holes at the last minute. I am sure there is a lot more cool stuff to come. Otherwise Apple is in deep trouble. All the hype to have only two computers that really aren't much of a revolution- there needs to be more.
I agree with, well, part of that. Jobs always gives major attention to a new release of iLife. He went on forever about iLife 05 when it was released, and there weren't many thrilled Appleheads coming to his defense when he spent more than 20 mins just on Garageband with iLife 04.
What was kind of surprising was that iWork got almost nothing, attention-wise, this time around. That doesn't bode well for a new application suite just starting it's second semester.
Otherwise, I agree that it was a disappointing keynote this time. Not a word about Leopard, and it was prime time for more than several words since Microsoft just showed off Vista. Most will probably say that Leopard is best left to WWDC, as OS updates have been in the past, but this time around things are different. In the past, Microsoft didn't have a new OS to talk about, whereas this year (supposedly) they do. And I suspect Microsoft will make the most of first half of the year (and beyond) pimping Vista. Apple had the perfect opportunity to counter that with a world-wide audience fixated and ready to report on anything Jobs had to say, and he didn't say anything. I really hope they are paying attention and not gearing up to make the same mistakes they made when Windows 95 was released.
And a brand new iMac? Just after they released the last brand new iMac with major public fanfare only 2 months ago with a wink towards the fact that Christmas was coming up? Thats a pretty good way to start pissing your customers off. And that iMac wasn't much of an update, all things considered. A pretty meek speed bump, slightly redesigned thiner case, iSight (nothing new) and a couple of software tidbits thrown in (Front Row and Photo booth). Not exactly earth shattering.
The new Macbooks, although maybe a relief to deprived Powerbook fans, aren't all that dazzling. It looks like they basically swapped the PPC chip for the Intel chip, and, well, here you go. Nothing like the G5 when it came out. It was redesigned from the ground up, new architecture, motherboard, case, the works. They didn't just slap a G5 into an existing Powermac G4 box. And as Gruber noted on his blog, Powerbooks are still somewhat ominously present in the line-up. Kind of unusual, and it makes you wonder whether Rosetta is really up to the task, at least for the pro end. It just seems rushed, with little to zero in the way of new attention-getting technologies (the intel chip was expected) or anything particularly exciting.
The poor little Shuffle was shuffled out the door, maybe next year. No major announcement regarding new video content on iTunes, or any new technologies related to delivering movies or enhanced video. If you go by the what was happening at CES, it seems that's the direction virtually all the major players in technology are headed this year. Where's Apple?
Frankly, I thought the last several keynotes have been disappointing, all of them since last year's WWDC. The WWDC keynote was impressive, if not surprising. But Apple's foray into video with the iPod and the music store has, so far, been tepid at best, at least by Apple standards. It seems to be banking more on the recognition of Apple's name, the iPod phenom and the music store, and not so much on new, groundbreaking, innovative, head-turning technologies or amazing content deals. It will probably succeed well enough for now with the iPod association, but when somebody figures out how to do feature films over the internet right, it just might change things the way Apple did with music, the iPod, and the music store.
So, if it's true that Apple dumped a lot of stuff planned for Macworld...well, I actually hope that was the case.
