Morganically Grown

This year’s Macworld San Francisco was, if the deluge of blogosphere responses is any indication, extremely important. Apple introduced three very significant brand-new products and updated six others, in addition to more demoing of Mac OS X Tiger — all to an overwhelmingly ecstatic response.

I haven’t seen such a positive buzz come out of a Macworld since I can remember. Last year’s MWSF, for instance, left people bewildered and underwhelmed at the pricing of the iPod mini. But everything that came out of the keynote this morning has sparked such enthusiasm in the Mac community that it is bound to go down as one of the most significant Macworlds ever.

The new products announced today:

• A nice-looking new word processing app called Pages, wrapped up with a new version of Keynote into a package called iWork.
• The recently rumored Mac mini, a 6½″ × 6½″ × 2″ sub-$500 headless machine.
• Apple’s long-telegraphed foray into the flash-based audio player market, the iPod shuffle.

In addition, iLife ‘05 includes updates for iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand; and Final Cut Express was upgraded with HD support.

Of course, even the most enthusiastic observer has to be asking a few questions: will the new headless Mac, freakin’ awesome as it is, actually succeed in drawing converts and growing market share? (It would be a tremendous shame if it didn’t.) And what about the iPod shuffle? Apple’s completely eliminated the display and has decided to base the product’s marketing entirely around the fact that you can’t see what you’re listening to, view your playlist, or navigate directly to specific tracks.

In the case of the iPod shuffle, I believe it will turn out to be another of Apple’s brilliant ideas that sound difficult to use, but end up being usability genius. Of course, the name and marketing scheme will also go a long way toward putting users in the right frame of mind. But many have already stated that it fits their listening habits perfectly — they frequently just listen to music on shuffle anyhow. The discovery of this habit is what Steve claims was their big breakthrough in the process of designing the iPod shuffle.

Whether the Mac mini ends up being successful no one can really say, but everyone seems to be in agreement that it sure hits the sweet spot. A 1.25- or 1.42-GHz G4, 40- or 80-GB UATA, 256MB RAM, combo drive, Airport & Bluetooth ready, FireWire, 2×USB, DVI/VGA, audio out, modem & ethernet, and iLife ‘05 preinstalled. All for $499 or $599, and in a sleek quarter-Cube form factor. How can any Mac user say no to that — much less a tentative switcher, curious about the Mac platform but not interested in paying a premium to experiment?

Potential uses abound: living room media server, closet web server, cheap desktop…hell, get two. For the first time in a long while, I feel there will be a new purchase in my future. Not immediate future, but still — I haven’t felt compelled to plan a new purchase in a long time.

Watch the keynote stream to see the announcements for yourself. There’s plenty of typical Jobs joviality and RDF, as well as the now expected, but always exciting, “just one more thing….” Recommended for any Mac fan.

A survey of the blogosphere’s responses so far:

• Scott Boms
• Mike Davidson
• Matt Haughey
• Michael Heilemann
• Matthew Mullenweg
• Veerle Pieters
• Greg Storey

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2005 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.