Macworld 2009

It seems that Apple has already preannounced one of their products to be unveiled at Macworld, with this news report covering it:


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

"I'll buy almost any thing if its shiny and made by apple!"

Hah! Thanks!

posted from my macbook

The production quality of those videos always impresses me, there must be quite a bit of work that goes into making them.

As for me, I'm off to buy a copy of World of World of Warcraft.

So yeah, not too much big stuff out today. iLife 09, iWork 09, and a new Macbook Pro 17 without a removable battery, but 8 hours life now.

And beyond that, iTunes is going 100% DRM free and 256kbit over the next few months. That to me was probably the biggest part of it.

And thinking about it a bit, I'm betting the reason no new Mac Mini's or iMacs came out is due to the closeness to the Christmas season. Too many new users with them still in the exchange period. 10.5.6 pretty much confirmed the new models, now it's just a time of when they will actually arrive.

Or you could just buy from Amazon and get that now, and get MP3s instead of AACs in addition. Oh, and still only 99¢.

iTunes still has about 4 million more songs then Amazon currently, and also will have song potentially cheeper, at the 69¢ mark. 99¢ and $1.29 seem to be the other tiers that iTunes music will be priced at, with the note from the keynote being that most songs will shift down towards 69, rather then up to 1.29. In any case, it's good to see the iTunes store still evolving, even though it has the #1 market share for music sales both digitally, and retail overall. Always worried about the Microsoft syndrome catching on at other places, where good changes cease once a product climbs to the top.

AAC vs MP3 doesn't really bother me either. MPEG 4 vs MPEG 1 format, and these days pretty much anything plays both.

This is all assuming I buy into the digital downloads anyhow. I think I might have 30 tracks now from Amazon and iTunes combined, excluding any random free tracks I've grabbed over the ages. I still pretty much stick to CD.

I'm pretty bummed there wasn't a new iMac announced. I have the cash saved up waiting to go on the new model. I am hoping for an LED backlight which is the main reason I am waiting.

Lots of the rumour sites suggest that some of the drivers already have new iMac's and Mini's listed so maybe they are not too far away. I hadn't thought about the returns angle, so maybe in the next month or two.

Although iLife 09, in-particular for me iMovie, looks fantastic I think there was a lack of the old wow factor to this key note. I was expecting more.

Cheers

Cris.

And no itunes to buy from Amazon.

Don't make any judgments until you actually see what happens. I don't have much faith in that last point. And just because they said "most" songs doesn't mean they said "good" songs.

Besides, I didn't hear who was actually setting these prices. I hope it's not like you see in the average record store, for example. In all the Best Buys I've been in, you find new stuff for $12.99, slightly old stuff for around $14.99, and frequently you'll find old stuff that's been sitting there for years and it's $17.99! I've never understood this pricing scheme, and I'm not going to blindly put my faith in Apple and whatever association they have with the industry.


The thing that really pisses me off is their proposal for music already downloaded. It's $0.30 to un-DRM any previously purchased music. I don't care what the reason is, that's absurd.

I can think of one player in particular that can't handle AAC.

Presumably, when you "upgrade" a song, you're also bumping it up from 128kbit AAC to 256kbit.

Anyway, I'm with Drakino. I have only a handful of tracks that I actually bought. Most all of my audio came from ripping my CDs. I'm more disappointed that Apple's DRM is alive and well for its video sales.