Here I am again, responding after MacWorld05-now that the Apple pundit/evangelist/rumor sites
have had their say. here’s mine:

I suggest you go to Apples’ website and take a look at the keynote. Not very exciting but you can
at least scroll through the boring parts and take a look at the demos. Obviously Steve is selling
Apple in his usual way-black turtleneck, paced very carefully, i was hoping for as “under the seat” surprise
like the wireless toilet-seat iBooks I saw in NY MacWorld one year. No such luck but some nice things did show.

SOFTWARE

iWork (Keynote 2 & Pages) (word processing app)
Hooray! Keynote is great and the one thing it is lacking is useful text editing. The “Appleworks” folks
can stay with Appleworks if they need a spreadsheet, I don’t need one. Integration with the iLife apps looks
promising. Output Keynote to Flash…? this means Pages will be your simple html editor. Since I’m a fan of Create and Composer (and NVu) I welcome the competition for simplifying this stuff.

iLife 05 (iDVD 5, Garageband 2, iMovie HD, iTunes 4.7)
The iLife suite is a great and cool suite of Applications. Like the iPod it introduces people to Apple software, which if needed scales to Pro Apps very well : iDVD to IDVD Studio, Garageband to Logic, IMovie to Final Cut, iTunes 4.7 to ??(iTivo?)??. Ok, you have to ditch your sub 1.25ghz iMacs to really use these applications (see below)
and a DVD drive is useful. But since this is included with new Macs-everyone has the tools for rudimentary
file editing- be they pdf,txt,jpg,html, etc…

Final Cut Express HD
-A nice upgrade and includes Soundtrack-precurser to Garageband, but a little more powerful.

iPod shuffle
$99 dollars for an iPod? cool.

Mac mini
$499 for an Apple CPU with iLife05? Awesome…be sure to get more memory, bluetooth, airport card, the combo
drive- the faster cpu–uh oh- better look at that iMac G5 again.
Really, I’m hoping Apple treats this as the loss leader it can be. Sure you can build your own *nux box inside a Shuttle case but this is so well constructed, technology folks will just salivate.

—
So I wait for more stuff to come along: Griffin Technologies released an awesome number of peripherals this week,
and NAMM is coming up -that may be interesting as well.
I just ordered an Alesis Micron- from what I hear this is the coolest keyboard anywhere.
more on this later…
O