After watching Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote speech (via Quicktime Stream), I’ve been surfing around, wondering what people’s thoughts are — it seems many folks are underwhelmed, but ultimately that’s usually what happens with these things. Lots of hype and anticipation, and when Jobs neglects to pull a golden egg from his bum people seem disappointed!
After thinking about it and posting responses on other people’s blogs, I figured I should post my thoughts here.
Read on to find out what I think about iPod mini, iLife, GarageBand and more…
I think a lot of people wanted either a super-iPod with a color screen and movies and internet access and wireless and cell phone capabilities and coffee maker, or they wanted the iPod mini, but about $100 cheaper. Folks forget that Apple always releases new products about 30% more than they should be, because they know they’ll sell them to the early adopters, then drop the price 6 months later. Not just Apple, all technology companies (successful ones, anyway).
I do think the iPod mini is a bit overpriced, but look at it this way — not only will it drop in price, but it will eventually become the de-facto form factor for Apple’s portable MUSIC player; the bigger size will cover multimedia efforts.
That said, I think the all-in-one portable multimedia device has some incredible limitations; Mainly, Content. It’s easy as pie to get high-quality digital music online and onto your iPod. Try doing the same with a movie or a TV show. It’s just not *easy* enough.
Rip a DVD (CSS be damned), but then you have to compress it. An hour later you might have something that’s reasonably portable. Moreover, the way the MPAA and television industries are trying to strangle digital transmission, I think the biggest obstacles are legal/regulatory, not technical.
Anyway, as far as wireless technologies go, bluetooth is a cable-replacement technology without sufficient bandwidth for even compressed audio/video — Firewire really is the best thing for it. Wi-Fi is nicer, but it’s still too slow and energy inefficient.
I’m sure apple is developing some groundbreaking technologies to accomodate some of these issues, but I don’t think we’ll see them until the price can come down to a point where they can make their usual 20-40% profits…
As for iLife, I’m really psyched about iPhoto sharing (plus better performance), as well as the new iDVD features — that mapping is really cool.
GarageBand, by itself is worth WAY more than $50 — consider that apple was selling the standalone Soundtrack for $250-300. As a multitrack editor alone GB would be cool, but as a multi-tracking, midi-editing, loop-based tool it’s pretty darn great.
As a novice Logic user — which sometimes seems way to complex for some of the simple tasks I want to accomplish — GarageBand really appeals to me.
Also, Apple’s iMovie has a new “Share” function (which Steve demo’ed) which includes a “share to my Bluetooth device,” automatically exporting and transmitting your iMovie to your phone. Way cool. This has been possible via iMovie’s quicktime export, but you’d be surprised the number of people who don’t even realize they can export Quicktime movies from iMovie! I think this is a great feature for its simplicity, as well as for popularizing the 3GP format and phones that support it.
I placed my order today. I’ll let you know how it turns out in actuality.