Love them or hate them, Apple events are Big Deals™ in the tech world. They’re slickly executed and almost always introduce a new product that invariably elicits polarizing opinions on the internets. We here at lalawag are intimately aware of how great of a sweet talker that Steve Jobs is, so we’ve put together a little summary and guide on Apple’s latest releases to help you look past the superlatives.
(We’re not going to spend too much time on the statistics that Apple always uses to kick off their presentations. Although, did you know that if just the Mac part of Apple were to split off into its own company, it would be #110 on the Fortune 500 with $22 billion in annual revenue? Did you also know that every Apple executive gets a lifetime supply of special edition Brawny paper towels made entirely of $50 bills? Only one of those fun facts was shown at the presentation.)
Here’s what was announced at the latest Back to the Mac Event:
1. iLife ’11
If you have a Mac, chances are you’ve used one of the apps in the iLife suite – Garageband, iMovie, or iPhoto. (iLife ’11 also contains iWeb: a “my first website” maker and iDVD: a simple DVD menu authoring app. However, Apple didn’t really tout these on the presentation or their website, so it might be a reasonable expectation for these to be throwaway apps.) Most of the first half of the presentation was dedicated to demonstrations of the new features of the three main iLife apps.
Here’s our takeaway of the major new features:
- You can work in a full screen mode with iPhoto now.
- iPhoto will automagically generate a slick looking slideshow for you using the geotags on photos you take.
- iPhoto integrates with Facebook nicely so you can manage your Facebook photos in the same place as your local ones.
- There’s a good amount of new templates to create dramatic yet professional movie trailers from your home videos in iMovie.
- It’s only a matter of time before we see dramatic movie trailers filled with penis shots and/or lewd behavior.
- Garageband’s new rhythm matching features are only relevant if your band sucks.
- There are more guitar/piano lessons included with Garageband now.
At the end of the day, the entire upgrade will only set you back $49.99. So if you’re a heavy user of these apps, it won’t break the bank to take the plunge to “the best version ever!” Frankly, I don’t find much use in the Garageband updates since I don’t record music with my band all that often, so it really boils down to if you make a lot of home videos and/or use iPhoto to manage all your photos.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I’m not a heavy user of the iLife suite, with the exception of Garageband to record podcasts. As such, I may have missed some nuances that more dedicated users would have the ability to spot.)
2. FaceTime on the Mac
FaceTime is now available for the Mac! It’s currently in a free beta and you can download it here. This will come as good news for those of us with iPhone 4s or new iPod Touches and have few people to video chat with. Now you can cause social anxiety to anyone with a Mac as well.
We’ve given it a whirl and can say it works as easily as advertised. FaceTime on the Mac uses your Apple ID account as your “phone number.” If you keep your contacts in your Mac, it’ll automatically populate your FaceTime address book with them. Other than having to know your Apple ID email address, there’s nothing else to set up in order to get your voice calling on. The video quality on both iPhone 4 and the Mac are pretty solid. There’s not much else to say here other than, “Get it if you know people with iPhone 4s.”
3. Mac App Store
It’s been awhile since a major update to the OS X operating system has been released. The next iteration of the software is code named “Lion” and slated for release in summer of 2011. Apple’s decided to give us a sneak peak of it during the event.
Now, I should caution the Mac fans to keep it in their pants for the time being because the only major tidbit we get is that there will be a unified Mac App Store launching. Sure, there was a bunch of talk about multitouch being the future and blah blah blah. Basically, Apple wants to integrate some of the advancements its made with its iOS on the iPad/iPhone with the Mac platform.
Here’s what that means:
- “Launchpad” is a new way to navigate your apps, basically lifting the iOS homescreen interface. You navigate pages by swiping and create folders by dragging icons over one another. Just think of your iPhone on your Mac.
- Full screen apps – now there’s a “maximize” circle on menu bars that will expand apps to take up all the screen real estate. (This was always one of my pet peeves as a Windows user on a Mac.)
- “Mission Control” is basically an update of Expose that incorporates the Dock and full screen app switching.
- Mac App Store – more on this below.
What’s the Mac App Store? Again, just imagine the App Store as you see it on iTunes right now for your iOS device, but for, well, Mac Apps. What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a normal user, it means there’s another choice for an easy, safe way to buy apps. Since Apple curates and maintains it, all the boring (yet important) stuff like secure payment, installation, and software updates is handled securely and easily without much effort on your part. You can even authorize up to five computers to download and redownload your purchased apps for free.
Is there a downside? Maybe. It’s hard to predict what kind of apps will appear on the store, but you can bet your sweet tushy that we’ll probably get some ports of existing iOS apps. Another concern might be with the types of apps Apple will allow on the store given its checkered history with censoring iPhone apps. Will Apple allow stuff like BitTorrent clients? There’s a lot of stuff out there that could be very useful to the average person, yet might not be the politically correct thing for Apple to support. It’s not a big deal if the Mac App Store is just one store in the mall that is the internet for you to shop in, but if it becomes the only store you can buy from, well then we might have a problem with that.
What does this mean if you’re a developer? I honestly don’t know since I’m not one myself. Marco Ament (of Instapaper and tumblr fame) had a great post on what he felt the Mac App Store meant for developers in the future here. It’s a recommended read even if you’re not a developer to glimpse what the future might bring. If you are a developer, feel free to chime in the comments with your thoughts. My first question to you would be if you are alright with giving Apple a 30% cut of your revenues.
The Mac App Store is supposed to launch for current Macs running Snow Leopard in about 90 days – well ahead of the Lion release next year.
4. New MacBook Airs
Hooooo boy. Here we go. This is when Steve Jobs really turns on the charm and gets you salivating enough over a nice piece of brushed aluminum to open your checkbooks. What does he have this time?
New MacBook Airs. At an affordable price. Available now.
I remember the great MacBook Air Announcement of ’08. Everyone Ooooh’d and Aaaahh’d at how thin and light it was. Then they saw the $1899-$3000 price tag and were like LOL no.
This time Apple wisely dialed down the pricing to a more affordable $999 for the 11″ version and $1299 for the 13″ one. (You can obviously spend more money for more disk space, RAM, CPU upgrades.)
I have to admit, these babies do look pretty slick. They weigh 2.3 and 2.9 pounds respectively and are less than an inch thick. The best part is that they come with a solid state drive standard, meaning that instead of hard drives they use very fast flash memory chips.
Now, I won’t waste your time going over each and every feature. For that and more, I will direct you over to Anandtech’s review of the devices here. No one does detailed benchmarking and testing in a very readable format like those guys, so I highly recommend you check it out if you’re serious about buying one of these things.
Personally, I view these things as luxury devices still. They’re very nice to have as your second or third computer, but they’re probably going to be a pain in the ass to act as your primary computer unless you have very simplistic needs. No optical drive means no DVD watching or CD listening/ripping. There’s no wired LAN port for those situations where you need to plug in. At the price points Apple starts at, you’re just not going to get very much SSD storage. The 11″ starts at 64GB of space while the 13″ starts at 128GB of space. Unless you don’t like consuming media or have simplistic computing needs, you might fill that up very fast. Finally, the Core 2 Duo processors in the new MacBook Airs are clocked at 1.4 GHz for the 11″ and 1.83 GHz for the 13″. These are very underpowered computers by today’s standards.
With all that said, theres something to be said for an extremely light and portable notebook computer. At the prices Apple is asking, they’re almost to the point where you might not think twice about adding another computer to your collection. The new MacBook Airs are the best netbooks ever. I can’t think of another computer I would rather have at my fingertips while on the couch watching TV or to travel with.
It comes down to your own personal computing needs and your monetary budget. If you don’t need the computing power or can afford to pay for another computer, I can see you being very happy with your purchase. If you can only afford one computer or have demanding productivity requirements, I’d advise looking elsewhere, perhaps the vanilla Macbook Pro (which starts at $1199).
