Macworld: The Best Is Yet To Come

You sat through what was a very boring Macworld Keynote 2004 SF you probably picked up on a few things. But did you catch the important stuff? Let�s find out with a little Keynote Kwiz (alliteration is my life):

1) GarageBand is to SoundTrack as iMovie is to:
a) Final Cut Pro
b) 40 bucks
c) Lord of The Rings
d) Something you could make really cool stuff with if all you had was time

2) People whining about paying 40 bucks for iLife _________
a) should simply use the previous version of iLife
b) should refuse to use iLife altogether
c) should switch to Windows and see what the 40 bucks would get them
d) should be shot

3) If the mini pod is fifty dollars better than a flash player, how many dollars better is the 15 GB iPod than the iPod mini?
a) the iPod is worse, too much space hurts my head
b) Steve says fifty bucks, I say fifty bucks
c) $146.67
d) you can�t put a price on color

4) The 20th anniversary Mac poster is:
a) cool enough
b) a fitting tribute to the most imitated computer of all time
c) slightly less stupid than the 1984 commercial featuring an iPod
d) worth what people paid for it

5) Steve�s main �take away� message was:
a) Apple is number 1 in online music sales
b) Apple is number 1 in mp3 player sales
c) iLife is like Microsoft Office for the times you�re not at the office
d) All of the above, Steve lacked focus

Answers: a, d, c, d, d

After MacWorld whining is par for the course, everyone does it and obviously I�m no exception, after all it�s fun and cathartic. We hard core Mac folks whip ourselves into a near frenzy over the yearly San Fran happening, some of us are mere steps away from dressing up and making the whole thing into some bizarre trek-like convention, so a little venting is good.

Whining aside there are a lot of things to like about the most recent MacWorld. GarageBand does look pretty cool and the iPod mini is very slick. At the moment the main criticism of the iPod mini seems to be the price. That complaint stems from the way Apple positioned the product as a flash mp3 player killer. Doing some field research today (I went to Target) I found the flash based mp3 players to be much cheaper than 199 figure touted by his Steveness. Sure they were all pretty cheaply made and lacked any form of understandable interface but they had the low price thing down. The iPod mini does fail on the low price issue but it excels in a few other areas. It�s undeniably cool, I imagine more than a few iPod owners will get an iPod mini and for some folks it�s plenty large enough. Take, for example, me. The iPod mini would hold my complete music collection a few times over, it�s small enough my toddler could easily flush it down the toilet and I could strap it to my arm, sit on a bench and pretend I had been jogging. The iPod mini would be a personal must have if I wasn�t so certain the toddler would, in fact, send it the way of Knoxville sanitation.

The iPod mini isn�t the best thing about MacWorld �04, not by a long shot. The best thing about this MacWorld isn�t the stuff that showed up, it�s the stuff that didn�t make it. In years past we would have been treated to the G5 introduction, the redesigned 15-inch PowerBook and the G4 iBook. This year all those things were released prior to MacWorld, which is nice, no artificially long waits before users get the stuff (how long was the 12� powerbook ready before release?) and no long periods between announcing a product and getting it in the users hands. So I believe Steve when he says Apple is going to make a lot of groundbreaking stuff in �04 and I am thankful I won�t have to wait until MacWorld �05 to see it.