A Disappointing Keynote

Okay, let’s see. First, Apple gives us iPhoto for free, and now we have to buy it.

iMovie was free, but no longer. Now you have to buy it.

iTunes is still free, at least, but is no longer a Macintosh-only program. Any crappy PC can now run it.

Why does the mini-iPod cost $249? Give me a break. I agree with Russ Walkowich. This is a bad move on Apple’s part. At first, I was happy to see the mini-iPod. But then the price flashed by, and I laughed. Seriously! For fifty bucks, you can get a real iPod! Where, I ask, is the benefit of buying one of these over-priced Mini-iPods? Apple, with their reputation for having the very best MP3 music player on the market, could have come out and killed the competition with a 1GB mini-iPod for less than $150, and the press would have been all over it for the next few weeks. Instead, we get a half-assed iPod WAY over priced. I hate to play armchair CEO, but this is a Cube-Style blunder.

This is the very first Macworld Expo keynote in which I was not really impressed with anything. Sure, GarageBand looks cool, but did it REALLY deserve to eat up that much of the keynote address? Apple basically introduced two new products, a $50 program (iLife) and a $250 MP3 player. (And yes, the Xserve was upgraded, as was the Xserve RAID, but neither are Keynote worthy to either the core Apple user or the press.)

I almost felt sad for Steve Jobs. I know it cannot be hard to get up there once or twice a year and pitch some new product, making it out to be the greatest things since, well, what ever he introduced a year ago was. But today’s keynote was long, boring, and uneventful, and mostly bad news for the users of iPhoto and iMovie. Apple wants MORE of your money, and you WILL pay!

Where is the new AppleWorks?

What did Steve Jobs say? Half the households in America have an active musician? Who the hell told Apple that? Unless they could those people who whistle, I think someone is blowing a lot of smoke to justify trying to sell GarageBand. (Which, by and by, wins the award for the stupidest application name of 2003-04.)

Wow, a NEW version of Microsoft Office! Cool! What does it have that the average Office user will feel compelled to upgrade? Oh, that’s right, not much. Yawn… Oh, wait, VirtualPC 7, we are told, will be released sometime in the next six months! Hey, if you purchase that, with Windows XP, it will set you back $219. Or you could spend twice as much and buy a real Windows XP system, with CPU, Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse…