New MacBook Air

Back to the Mac; that was the name of the Apple event for today from their Infinite Loop campus at Cupertino. And yes, they have finally done a Mac conference for the first time in a while. Yet, I can’t help but think that both the setting and how it was presented indicate how little they, or Jobs seems to care about the Mac. It was in their campus’ small conference hall, rather than in a bigger centre they did their iPod, iPad and iPhone events in – yet, they tried hard to make it think that they do.

iLife 11

iLife was the first product after the usual numbers (which wasn’t presented by Steve). iLife 11 is just the same apps as the previous iLife (iLife ’09). With enhancements, yet they only showed three. Phil the Schill-er presented the iPhoto section. iPhoto has more social capabilities, new book designs (to get more money) which apparently selects the most appropriate images for the page for you to then go and edit. They are also lots of full screen features in iPhoto. The important thing is that Steve Jobs thinks “that’s awesome” – which is odd for Steve and a new Apple product isn’t it!

iMovie was next. The UI hasn’t changes at all since that drastic change we saw with iLife ’08. They have enhanced the audio editing. Which is something iMove needed because it was absolutely awful for sound in the previous version. Also they had sound effects… which aren’t something that’s amazing. Another new feature they had was “Movie trailers” which needed no real imagination at all. It was a template where you would then edit the text on screen (you can have between two to six cast members) and then drop clips into the set slots (or let the “people finder” – facial recognition – do some of it). This is quite an interesting feature… but for many people I can’t see this been anything other than an interesting feature. Also, I have to point out, it does make the film trailers look awfully cheap (and they is even one Indiana jones clone which is the sole reason why I will buy this), but what do you expect from software.

The Steve Jobs quote that came after – “Its AH-MAZING” – Shock.

The third and final one Apple decided to show off is Garage Band – and bullied some kids in showing off their “Groove matching features”. This is just a form of auto-tune and beat matching for music. This, on stage, worked very well – surprise? For further corrections Apple created “flex-time” which is just dragging out the sound waves out for tiny-time fixing errors. In my opinion, not much new in Garage Band.

Over all the new iLife is just an addition of new features and nothing brilliant. And it’s a shame they didn’t create anything brilliant with iWeb or IDVD (which they didn’t show on stage). iLife is £50-ish (US$49) and free on all new Macs, and is out today.

OS X Lion

Mac OS X came next, Mac OS X Lion to be precise. The whole thing is about “OS X meets the iPad”. “Vertical surfaces don’t work” – He is correct here, and can’t see why he needed consumer research; he said they needed to be flat. And this is why the multi-touch mouse and magic-mouse were released. Lion will also bring the “Mac App Store”. Other than it been on the mac, it’s all the same details as the iTunes store. So, that’s interesting… something which has been rumoured about has come true. Only thing is, these rumours were about Windows 8.

Speaking of the Mac App store, it will be launching surprisingly quickly. Within 90-days.

Launch pad is something which is more usable than the App-Store. It brings up an IOS-esque window management screen. It operates in exactly the same way (with the folders, and the slide navigation) as IOS does.

Full screen apps is something they also showed off, again taking this from IOS. This should look bloody brilliant on the Mac Screens – which are all ways brilliant. Now the green plus button makes the application in full screen. Launch for OS X Lion is expected to be in Summer 2011.

New MacBook air.

One more thing though… and according to Jobs it comes back to the theme of “Back to the Mac”. “What would happen if a MacBook met the iPad” – “What would happen if they hooked up” – but don’t worry… it’s the “most amazing thing we’ve [Apple] ever created”. It’s the new MacBook air. It has complete uni-body construction and all the features you find on other MacBooks.

The details of the device are

• 13.3 led screen or 11.6 inch.
• 1440×900 pixels or 1366×768 pixels
• Core 2 duo processor
• NVIDIA GeForce 320m
• FaceTime camera (note the change from iSight to FaceTime – does this mean the end of iChat?)
• No Optical drive
• No Hard drive – they have gone to complete SSD.

Now, I can only think that they have gone

to the SSD to get the 30 day standby time for the battery (on both models). Now, he wanted to make sure that they were using a conservative measurement of battery life though. Yet, this SSD appears not to be replaceable – it looks soldered onto the board.

The important thing though is the price. Yet, they are still very expensive. They start at $999 with a 1.44 GHz processor and 64GB SSD (and 11.6” screen). So, they are very underpowered units – even for laptops. And yes… they are starting to be sold today. I really do think that it is still too expensive for what you get in the device. Way too expensive – but, they will probably sell.

For once all the rumours were correct, we had the MacBook air, new iLife and new OS X. For more in-depth analysis listen to the next GMCRF fm where we will be talking about this in detail.