Macworld 2005
January 12th, 2005 by admin
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p>Much to talk about after today’s Macworld Expo Keynote. The internet was abuzz with rumors, and various web sites were tracking the annoucements in real time. I’m going to cross post this here at Maciraf and at my own personal blog.
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p>I think the Mac Mini is a pretty cool idea, though if you start upgrading it the price wil escalate quickly from the $499 price point. The Apple store isn’t working yet, but if you add a keyboard, mouse, RAM, airport, and a monitor we’re right back to $1000 or so…maybe a little less. Anyway, it certainly can’t hurt to have a Mac that costs about as much as some iPods. And it’s clearly aimed at PC users who might be consdering switching – they can use their old USB perihperals and any monitor they have.
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p>They should bundle Move2Mac with it; that’s the program that will (presumably) move over various settings, etc. from a PC into a new Macintosh. There has to be a frustrated group of Windows users out there who are sick of the viruses, etc.
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p>Okay, the Apple Store is working, slowly. Adding a keyboard & mouse (+$58), airport card (+$79), superdrive, (+$100) and RAM (a true scam at +$75) – and starting the high end Mac Mini with the bigger hard drive (80GB) and faster CPU (1.42 GHZ) (base price, $599)… that brings us to $911. Add a CRT monitor and we’re at what – $1100ish? An eMac is a much better buy, I think. I think with superdrive you can get an eMac for $799? $899? Something like that. These are all non-education prices, btw.
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p>The Mac Mini advantage, then, is that if you have all these things, especially a monitor, you can save some money. My dad should get one, I think. All he’d need to do is add some memory and he’d finally be out of the OS 9 world. It looks these things are user servicable for adding memory.
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p>The iPod shuffle is an interesting product as well. I don’t really know anything about flash-based players. Do most not have screens? How much are they? How much do they hold? I have no idea. The shuffle seems about as good as a tiny mp3 player can be. But I could be wrong, I’m just speculating. Since it can’t hold all your music, like the other iPods claim to be able to, it makes sense that it has no options but to play music mostly randomly. Anyway, the price is right. They’ll sell a lot of them.
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p>I expected the iPod Mini to get a size bump, but not such luck. Everyone wants to hear about G5 Powerbooks but that’ll be a while. I look forward to the next version of OS X, Tiger. Let us hope it doesn’t break anything in IRAF. 
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p>Since I’m about to buy an iBook G4, I’m happy to see that iLife has gotten a refreshing. The new iPhoto and iMovie HD look very cool. I don’t use Garageband, really, and I don’t have a superdrive so no iDVD for me. It’s also worth nothing I can’t find my iLife ’04 CDs anywhere; though I did buy the damn thing.
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p>By the way, this is another indication that it’s not wise to buy any Apple products before Macworld, even when it’s an iBook, who didn’t get any udpates today. Why then you ask? Beacuse Apple has an “iLife up-to-date” program for people who buy Macs today or later that don’t include iLife ’05. But if you bought an iBook yesterday? You’re out of luck. No iLife ’05 for you!
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p>The new iPhoto also includes cheaper prints, so I heard – $0.19 a print which is pretty good, though you still have to pay for shipping. The current iPhoto 4 seems to be choking when I try to order prints, and then still shows the older, more expensive pricing. So, it doesn’t seem like this new pricing is in the system yet, or maybe it only works with iPhoto 5.
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