Steve Jobs never showed up at Macworld, and now I can see why. Pretty underwhelming show. Here's the scoop:
-New iLife '09. iPhoto has features like "Faces" where you can search through your library by a specific person's face. iMovie has advanced features that were left out in the last version. GarageBand has an instrument-learning feature.
-New iWork '09. Most notable features are in Keynote, where you can use new slide features and even sync them with your iPod Touch and use it as a clicker for presentations. Nice.
-New 17-inch MacBook Pro. The best thing about it is its absolutely stunning battery life: 8 hours. To make this happen, it's sealed, but what makes up for that is that it lasts for over 1000 full charges; over three times the industry standard. It doesn't add any size, weight, or price to the notebook.
-One More Thing...: iTunes is now DRM-free. iTunes Plus is now the "new iTunes standard". You now get better song encoding (better quality), and the songs are burn limit-free and digital rights-free (so you can play it on any device). They also thought this through; you don't have to buy every song all over again. You can just upgrade the whole library to iTunes Plus, but bad news: it costs 30 cents to upgrade each song (60 cents for music videos, and 30% of an album's price to upgrade a whole album). Oh well. New prices for iTunes as well. Songs, depending on the music label's wishes, will either be 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. Most full albums will still cost $9.99.
...And that's it. That's all. Pretty disappointing final Macworld, but I think it's a symbol that Apple's done relying on Macworld as a deadline for all of their work. They now work on their own schedule and will probably rent a venue whenever they want to showcase any new products. The best news for me is that Steve is alive and soon to be well. The slate, in my view, has been cleaned for Apple. Time to make some great products again.
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