At roughly 4am or so in the morning (Singapore time of course), Apple held what was going to be its final Macworld keynote. After more than 2 decades of releasing its brand new products at what is arguably the world’s largest Mac convention, it has finally decided that 2009 will be the last time they’ll participate in Macworld.
So I booted up my computer early this morning, hoping to hear about some great new stuff Apple was going to introduce, considering how this was going to be their last year and they’d want to go out with a big bang. At first, things seemed pretty cool, but I realised how boring the whole keynote was going to be halfway through.
Phill’s first and last Macworld keynote
Before I get into the keynote though, there’s one thing I want to say about Phil Schiller. In every single Macworld keynote in the past, Steve Jobs has always been the one to give the keynote. No matter how big or small the new products were, every single Mac fan couldn’t wait to watch Steve Jobs unveil it. So it was quite surprising that he wasn’t going to be doing it this year, instead handing it over to Phil Schiller. I have to say, the first few minutes Phil stepped on stage and began talking about how successful Apple stores all over the world were doing, he seemed, of all things, nervous, even as the crowd applauded his every announcement. I suddenly realised the reason why this small emotion was so starking, because this never happened with Steve Jobs. Steve basked in the audience’s applause, encouraged by it, and you could almost see his face glow with glee everytime the crowd applauded. It almost seemed like the same smugness and glow that he had at 1984′s Macworld when he introduced the first ever Macintosh. Alas, things were different with Phil. You could just tell he was a much more humble person on stage, accepting the crowd’s applause, but not exactly basking in it like Jobs usually does. After a few minutes though, he no longer had much of a problem of “stage fright” and did a pretty good job on stage.
As for the keynote itself? Here’re roughly a list of things Apple introduced:
- iLife ’09
- iPhoto ’09 has new features like face recognition and support for geotagging so you can organise photos according to where you take them
- iMovie ’09 builds upon last year’s (terrible) version of iMovie, adding new features that’ll hopefully make it a more robust movie editing software (hopefully as good as iMovie ’06).
- Instructional videos in Garageband that teach you how to play instruments. Extra $5 videos are sold where various artists teach you how to play simplified versions of their songs.
- Apparently updated versions of iDVD and iWeb as well, but were not covered in keynote
- iWork ’09
- Pages has a new fullscreen view (ala WriteRoom), ability to sync tables with Numbers, so when you edit the table in Numbers, it will update the same one in Pages as well, dynamic outline feature similar to the sidebar you’d see in Microsoft Powerpoint and Keynote
- Keynote has new transitions, plus “Magic Move”, which is really cool. You set up your 2 slides, and Keynote automatically transitions them for you using advanced transitions that wouldn’t be possible manually. Some new themes and charts, etc.
- Keynote Remote, an application for iPod Touch/iPhones. Control slides via Wifi, advance slides by swiping, can even view next slide/presenter notes.
- Numbers has new formulas/functions for more advanced users, table categories to organise tables by a certain column, etc.
- iWork.com
- an online portal that’s in beta stage for now. Users can upload documents and have others collaborate on the same document by sending them emails. Sound familiar? (I’ll get to that in a moment)
- 17″ Macbook Pro
- Unibody, plus all the standard stuff you’d expect in a Macbook Pro now. 3 USB ports, one Firewire 800 port. Up to 2.93 Intel Core 2 Duo, up to 8GB RAM, GeForce 9600M GT graphics card, etc.
- The biggest thing? 8 hour battery life. Yeah, EIGHT hours.
- iTunes
- Songs now priced at $0.69, $0.99, $1.29. Obviously, older songs are going to be priced at $0.69 while new releases at $1.29.
- All songs eventually going to be DRM-free (Hooray!), must pay to “upgrade” them and remove DRM (rip-off).
- Download songs through 3G on iPhone
And… that’s it. Zero hardware updates, no earth shattering announcements (except perhaps 8 hours battery life). The most interesting things were probably the 8 hour battery life, Keynote Remote and iPhoto’s nifty new features. If your more interesting announcements are your very first announcement and an iPhone app that you cover for 2 minutes, you know your keynote is boring.
It seems like the market agreed as well, seeing as how Apple’s stock dipped slightly immediately following the keynote, which is to be expected I guess, considering how lackluster their FINAL keynote at Macworld was. The biggest announcement was probably the 8 hour battery life, which is really something to boast about. Hopefully this will force other laptop manufacturors to research batteries which have longer battery lives.
Other than that, the rest of the keynote was pretty lackluster. But 2 announcements really stand out as major letdowns: iWork.com and DRM free music.
Pay for Google Documents?
Honestly, I can’t imagine how many people will be willing to actually PAY for iWork.com. Phill stated that it’s currently free as it’s in open beta, but apparently it’s going to become a paid service when it’s out of beta, which is just stupid. Why? Because Google Documents has been offering the same service for ages now, for free. Sure, you can’t leave comments, and don’t have a “chatbox” in the sidebar with Google Documents, but that’s hardly a big deal, knowing how Apple will charge some exorbidant fee for iWork eventually. Not to mention you can actually EDIT the documens (within the browser as well) using Google Docs while you can only leave notes/comments for others in iWork.com. And am I really the only one who noticed that you can’t even scroll through the whole document in iWork.com? You have to select the individual pages in the sidebar and thus can only view one page at a time. The only way to see the next page is to click on it in the sidebar instead of simply scrolling down. What kind of UI design is that?!
Pay to do what you want with YOUR music?
As for the new DRM free music, it’s really a waste of time. According to Apple, people who shop on the iTunes store have to PAY more just to get rid of DRM? Meaning they have to pay more just so that they can do whatever they want with a file they’ve already bought? What kind of logic is that?! Furthermore, many users’ libraries aren’t small, and at 30 cents per song (just to “upgrade” them), it amounts to a few hundred dollars for some users to get rid of the annoying DRM. Why we users have to pay more just to do what we want with a song is beyond me.
All in all, it’s sad to see Apple go out on a low note at their last ever Macworld keynote. We were all really expecting something more. Alas, it seems we’ll have to wait awhile longer for major annoucements. It’s just such a shame that Apple’s final Macworld keynote will go down in history as one of its most boring and disappointing ones.
And on a random note, seems like the Silent Keynote campaign was a complete failure, considering how the crowd cheered at every small announcement.
