Yesterday's keynote was for me a mix of missing Steve and really wanting that 'One More Thing' to be a Mac Mini Tower. Everyone comes away from Macworld or from watching the keynote with some sort of complaint, but on reflection it was pretty sound.
Steve Jobs not being there was a big shame. All I really want to say on the matter is that my thoughts go out to you Steve. I hope you are fighting fit real soon and carry on as CEO at Apple for a long time to come.
iLife 09 was really nice to see. Expected, yes, but the content was very good. Face recognition and Places in iPhoto is worth the upgrade alone. Add to this the added functionality in iMovie, where we get better editing modes for more accurate clips, plus lots of nice candy thrown in too. The new version of iMovie keeps it simplicity and adds back some of the timeline features that we missed in iMovie HD without Apple admitting they were wrong making such radical changes to the app last year.
iWork 09 is another nice upgrade. I like the idea of Keynote being controllable with such style from the iPhone. The iWork.com announcement is also very very cool. When it comes out as a full version I hope that Apple add the ability to give editing writes to certain people. Yes, I know they could download the Pages document (for example), make changes and then re-upload a new version. But making online edits or local edits, with true version tracking would be a really powerful combination. Although not of great interest to me personally, the new Numbers and Keynote features are also very good too.
The new 17-inc MacBook Pro had some things to like and others to question. The questionable inclusion is the lack of user replaceable battery or hard drive. Yes, the reasons were explained and eight hours battery life is awesome. Power users will no doubt complain that they need to carry a spare battery with them. Much more positive is the anti-glare screen option. It seems like Apple listened that not everyone likes gloss. Whilst I don't expect this to filter down to the MacBook, I would be very surprised if we did not see this as a CTO option on the 15.4-inch pro version pretty soon. Apple would sell a lot more if they added this to the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro sooner rather than later.
The final iTunes announcements were a nice round-off to the whole event. At last DRM has been kicked into touch and we can now enjoy moving our music downloads around as and where we wish. Well done Apple.
In closing, it really saddens me that there will be no Apple next year at Macworld. No Apple Expo Paris and certainly no appearance by the company at MacLiveExpo London. I just hope that they more than make up for this by holding at least one special event for new products every year... on their own schedule of course.