| Wednesday, July 17, 2002 |
09:52 - Nickel Rundown
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Hokay. I'd say that's a pretty darn good keynote, all things considered. They delivered everything we expected them to, with a few twists; they didn't do anything really out-there, like some of the rabid speculation had it; and they had some surprises that nobody had expected at all.
First of all, there was a "One more thing..." the 17" iMac, which came as a surprise to nobody. However, what did come as a surprise was that it's 17" widescreen, continuing the "premium" placement of widescreen monitors and moving them into the consumer market. And it's 1440x900, which is considerably more pixel real estate than if they'd just left it at 1024x768 and tacked on some area on the sides. This should displease nobody. Oh, and the graphics are upgraded to GeForce4MX across the board-- so no more complaints there.
$1999 for the top-end 17" with SuperDrive... not bad, I'd say.
A whole lotta iPod stuff. There's the new 20GB model, as people had expected; but it's more than that. The body is now 10% thinner. The scroll-wheel is now a solid-state touch-sensitive trackpad thingy instead of a moving part. There's a headphone remote and a belt case. There's a little door over the FireWire port. And they didn't drop the 5GB entirely-- they just moved it to $300, while the 10GB and 20GB are $400 and $500 respectively.
Oh, and they released a Windows version too. This doesn't mean iTunes for Windows; it means Apple partnered with MusicMatch to produce a new version of that software, which I understand to be the closest thing on the PC to iTunes, which auto-syncs with the iPod. So now there's a packaged solution for Windows buyers, who otherwise would have had to find XPlay on their own. (I'll bet the XPlay guys are fuming today.)
iTunes 3 is kickass, though. Per-song ratings (0-5 stars). A new "Composer" field. A "Play Count" field, which increments whenever a song finishes, and a "Last Played" field. Audible.com support, with live bookmarking so you can listen in iTunes, pause it, sync your iPod, then have the iPod pick up right where you left off, and vice versa. And then there's Smart Playlists, which auto-generate themselves based on criteria you select (artist name, date, rating, number of plays, and options to randomize, to limit to a certain number of songs, and to live-update as new songs are added). Very cool.
Oh, and it also now puts its iTunes Music folder inside (gasp!) your Music folder, instead of Documents. And it will now rename your folders and files inside there to match any changes you make in the files' ID3 tags. This is kickass.
Meanwhile, one of the surprise announcements was iCal, which is a pretty neat little calendaring app. It publishes calendars to the Web, and synchronizes them by subscription. It doesn't seem to import from Outlook or Meeting Maker, but maybe that will be forthcoming later. The big nice thing about it is that you can also publish your calendar do your iPod, or to your cellphone using iSync-- the other new surprise iApp.
iSync is a little palette that keeps devices like your iPod, your Palm, and your cellphone (via Bluetooth) available, and lets you sync them on request-- pushing your contacts (from Address Book) and calendars (from iCal) into the devices. It also lets you publish these things to a secure location in your .Mac services, and thus keep your multiple computers synced together. That's pretty cool.
They had the CEO of Sony Ericsson on stage to talk about his cellphones and how Apple is leading the way with connectivity and so on; he clearly had no idea what he was actually saying, woodenly reciting lines like "Watch this space," in an accent so thick I could barely distinguish it from that of the CEO of the Chinpokomon company. "We ah very concerned about youh concerns! ...With your big American penis."
Speaking of Address Book, this is the first time we've really got to see it demoed live-- and it looks pretty tricked-out. Lots of zany effects (the smooth column expansion-- yargh!), and its big claim to fame is live interaction with stuff like Rendezvous and iChat, updating itself whenever someone with more info comes within range. This Address Book is obviously going to make Mail a lot cooler, but it's supposed to be accessible from any other app as well, like Inkwell. What I wonder is whether this means the Palm Desktop is now obsolete-- whether all that hard work Palm put in to get an OS X-native version out is now rendered pointless. That would suck, but...
So then there's .Mac. I kinda wondered how Steve would introduce this without drawing down a storm of booing. And he did; he led into it by talking about how nothing's free anymore-- POP3 services from Yahoo and MSN are now like $30/year, and those free disk-space services (like iDrive) are now gone. (Gee, you'd think they didn't have any visible means of bringing in income, or something!) So then he said iTools is becoming .Mac, and mentioned that, hey-- Microsoft had .NET, right? But all that is is just what Apple's been doing all along, with iTools. So, said Steve, we're going to just jump into that boat... because you know, ours actually does something!
That's what being a "master showman" is. Unveiling a price hike from zero to $100/year and getting laughs instead of boos.
Anyway, he showed off lots of new Jaguar stuff. It's good to see how Mail will work with all the spam-filtering doohickeys (I loved how when he turned it on, about 98% of his inbox went brown-- that got a laugh), and iChat was fairly cool. Sherlock 3 looks outstanding. And what Sherlock once was-- just a file-finder-- is now built into the Finder itself, which makes a whole lot more sense to me. It's where it was in the longlongago days, after all.
The Finder should be awfully fun to use, by the way. Folder windows jump out of their source locations, using what looks like the Scale effect; this is something I'd been saying they should do for over a year now. Everything looks super-snappy-fast. And spring-loaded folders will be a welcome sight. (Now if only we could get labels back...)
The coolest thing about Jaguar is that they seem to be sticking with the code-name on up through release. The "X" logo on the box and the CD has jaguar spots, and just look at the OS X page-- as Paul puts it, "Coolest... tab... ever."
Subtly updated look to the whole apple.com website, as a matter of fact; the Apple logo on the leftmost tab is now a gray "metal" looking thing, and the tabs now look more "Jaguar-style", crisper and shinier. The ".Mac" tab is brushed-metal; the rest are colored as they used to be, except for that cool-ass OS X one.
What else? Not much... no POWER4-based tower Macs, no new digital device, no tablet Mac-- not like anybody seriously expected that anyway. This was a nice across-the-board keynote, the kind of thing that I enjoy getting up early for.
And whaddya know... suddenly I'm feeling a whole lot better today. Maybe the dizziness has all just been pre-keynote jitters or something. Though that would so suck.
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