Second Helpings at Macworld

Khoi

20 years ago

Everything that Steve Jobs announced in today’s Macworld Expo keynote address can be thought of as a kind of second helping. There’s a sequel, like the iLife ’05 suite of digital lifestyle products. There’s a second taste of Apple’s teasing foray into a full-productivity suite, in which the new version of Keynote is bundled with a brand new word processing program under the name iWork. There’s a new, lower-priced version of Apple’s winning digital music player called the iPod shuffle, which almost seems as if it’s being sold as an accessory to its larger siblings. And there’s the Mac mini, which is being pitched as either a replacement for a Windows PC or a companion to an existing Macintosh. In an unexpected way, you could even say that it’s a kind of sequel, too.

One of Everything, Please

Below: Two sexy. The new iWork suite and the tempting Mac mini.

For my part, I’m ready with my plate. I was extremely pleased by the way the Keynote went today, at least insofar as it saw the release of a few items that I’ve really been wanting for a long time. Since I lost my iPod, I’ve been in the market for a new one, so it’s nice to have a low cost option. I’m almost always going to be up for improvements to iLife’s iPhoto — with, hopefully, some big-time speed scalability this time — so that goes in the shopping cart straight away. Similarly, the idea of an Apple-authored word processor like Pages is tremendously appealing to me — I’m surely going to pick up a copy of iWork.

Finally

Even without Pages, iWork is a tremendously easy sell for me in that it contains Keynote 2, the long-awaited major revision to Apple’s gorgeous presentation program. Last week I wrote about how much I’d been looking forward to a new version of this program which, almost unexpectedly, I’ve been using more and more of over the past year. Most of the advertised improvements seem to be in the category of ‘bells and whistles.’ They all look fantastic, but I’m hoping that, when I get my hands on a copy, it will bear out more much-needed usability improvements like this one.

Mini Me

As for the Mac mini, its US$500-600 price range is incredibly tempting. For my little Manhattan apartment, it would be great to have a new Mac as discreet as this one to use as a central server for my home network. If I start hearing about people successfully installing Mac OS X Server on their Mac minis, I’ll be reaching for my wallet. As an aside: the funniest thing about this new, “headless” Mac is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a resurrection of the Power Mac G4 Cube. That one was five years too early, I guess.