Apple exits Macworld with a whimper

A sparse speech by Phil Schiller left the audience wanting more.

A year ago Steve Jobs took the stage in The Moscone Center and announced the Macbook Air, iPhone / iPod software updates, iTunes movie rentals, Apple TV 2.0 and Time Capsule.

This year, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller took the stage to announce iLife and iWork updates, a 17” Macbook Pro – something expected for months – some price increases to iTunes songs (mind you, thankfully DRM-free) and iTunes downloads to your iPhone over 3G.

A quick summary of the announcements today at the Macworld 2009 Keynote, which by the way, marks the last time Apple plans to officially participate in the annual gathering of the Apple faithful:

17” Macbook Pro – About time, this unibody beast comes loaded with 8 HOURS of non-removable battery life, the usual assortment of ports and HD space and support for 8 gigs of memory. Still not sure it is worth the $2,999 price tag, but some people will think so, and will welcome this long-awaited upgrade.

iLife ’09 – Available toward the end of January, this ‘new’ version includes upgraded versions of all the applications with some fun updates. Garageband ’09 has lessons, including video lessons from the likes of Sting, Norah Jones, Ben Folds and more. iPhoto ’09 comes with better online sharing, facial recognition and the ability to geo-tag your photos and see on a virtual map where they were snapped. iMovie, iWeb and iDVD all come with enhancements and updates, nothing too ground-breaking here though. An interesting note is that Google chose this week to release the Mac version of their free iPhoto competitor Picasa, which in my opinion is better than iPhoto '08.

iWork ’09 – Now available to purchase, this office suite includes substantial upgrades to Pages, Numbers and Keynote, as well as a new online collaboration function. The online functionality is in Beta as Apple claims they want your input to help shape it into a service that fits your needs. How nice of them.

iTunes – DRM is going away. Eventually. 8 of the 10 million songs on iTunes are now DRM free, and you can easily upgrade your current library of songs to the new format. The only problem is that it costs $0.30 per song and you can ONLY upgrade your entire library (not individual songs) - at least for now. Apple has also released tier pricing. Songs newer than 6 years are $1.29, while anything older than 6 years is either $0.69 or $0.99. Also new is the ability to browse the iTunes store from your iPhone, using 3G cell networks (instead of WiFi hotspots). This is pretty cool because it means you can quickly download songs wherever you happen to be and they will automatically sync back to your computer. Of course you will probably want to make sure you don’t go over your monthly data allotment.

So there you have it, a keynote that if delivered by Steve Jobs would have been much more entertaining but wouldn’t hide the fact that there really wasn’t that much to get excited about.

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