Apple had apparently decided that the Macworlds had had their time and that they were not the place anymore to talk to the customer. On top, in an ever faster changing technology environment rather rare events like Macworld can often not be waited for to introduce new products the 'Apple way'. We have seen this on many occasions in the past already, when Apple invited to their so called "Special Events".
Even more stir came from the fact that Phil Schiller and not the magician Steve Jobs would give this last keynote. Blogs saw Steve once more on his deathbed, but it turned out that he was "just" recovering from a hormone imbalance.
Be it as it might, when the stage opened to the last keynote Apple would have at a Macworld, a nervous Phil Schiller came up to address the crowd (see the stream here).
In 2005 Schiller had already given the keynote single-handedly, because Jobs was not available due to surgery of pancreatic cancer in the months before the keynote. And he was also a constant contributor during the events in the last years.
Three new things he would present today, he promised the crowd and after the continuously impressive track record of the Mac's industry growth compared to the PC...
... he started things with the new version of iLife, focussing on iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band.
iPhoto now has some cool features which make keeping track of your photo library easier.
The first one being Faces, a face detection function which can be used to teach iPhoto a face, associate it with a name and have the software thus automatically tag persons in all the photos you have of them. Very cool.
Places makes use of GPS geotagging functions of new cameras. You can see exactly where you have taken a photo on a trip. As a matter of course, you can also do this manually, should your camera not have a GPS function, yet.
iPhoto now also has Facebook and Flickr support, which can be very useful, and now has a really awesome slideshow function with a bunch of great themes.
Updated book printing options (including maps) give more cool to the app... If the picture processing wasn't so poor compared to Lightroom, I might consider giving iPhoto another chance.
Really impressive is also the new iMovie.
It now features a really cool and easy to use precision editor for audio and video, with smart recognition and help, which gives much needed power when you edit your movies.
There are also beautiful themes with animated travel maps. And there is a video stabilization feature that seems to work pretty nicely, though I got the impression from the explanation that analyzing that shaky bit of film would eat up quite some computing power.
Garage Band is the app in iLife that I find most useless, as I do not play an instrument. But I have to say that the new "Learn to Play" function is quite clever. Included are 9 basic lessons for both the guitar and the piano, lectured by a video instructor in high quality HD resolution. Clever.
More lessons can be bought online. The eye popping thing, though, is that these additional lessons are given by artists like John Fogerty, Sting, Norah Jones and many others.
The other iLife applications had also some upgrades, but these were not demoed.
The second part of the keynote was about iWork. Once more, the software upgrades and the ease of use that was demonstrated made me smile.
Keynote has new animation tools: Magic Move for really cool transitions between slides, Object Transition for nice reshuffling of items and pretty text transitions and chart animations.
Especially the first two are really powerful and if you are used to Powerpoint, then these make your eyes water. All of this comes with nice themes, too, and it simply looks great.
A little treat is the Keynote Remote, an iPhone / iPod Touch application that can be used to control your presentation and even preview a slide on the display of your iPhone or iPod. Really awesome - but limited!
It only works when you have everything hooked up to Wifi. This might not be always possible depending on where you give a presentation.
Pages has grown up a bit, too, and now offers things like format hierarchies, math type support and additional templates. Same thing with Numbers, which now features better formulas and functions, better charts, live update of spreadsheets which have been pasted into Pages and, inevitably, also new templates to make your spreads look great.
More interesting than Pages and Numbers, however, was the beta of a new service Apple is going to offer: iWork.com. Via this platform you can upload, share, review and comment on your iWork documents in any up to date browser. The browser window you navigate and work in looks perfectly like the actual iWork application, which is really cool (I have seen this before with MobileMe and it is surprising when you see it).
Clearly a further step into and an experiment with cloud computing.
Then Schiller finally came to part three of the keynote, introducing the new 17 inch MacBook Pro.
Less than an inch thick and only around 6.6 pound and made from the same unibody design as its brother and sister: the principle technology and design was not a big surprise.
The marvel that will be criticized and loved is the new battery that Apple designed for this masterpiece. Not only does it give up to incredible 8 hours of run time on a single charge (or so they say). It also is not replaceable by the user. Apple claims the battery's lifespan is much longer than the industry's standard (3x that is) and can be re-charged a thousand times, which equals roughly a period of 5 years.
Hm. Taking away freedom from the customer is always polarizing.
But what an impressive piece of engineering!
And that was it.
As you can see, this year's keynote was mostly driven by software applications and new hardware was rare (yet stunning). Phil did a nice job and became a bit more relaxed as the 90 minutes passed by.
Without a doubt, Steve Jobs would have done a better job, but there is an important point to this: be it Steve or not who pulls the bunny out of the hat - Apples' products are amazing no matter what!
And there was one more thing.
iTunes, one of the key products for Apple's amazing success in the music market, has sold 6 billion songs since its introduction in April 2003. It has a library of 10 million songs and has become the number one sales channel for music in the US.
Apple has now finally buried the hatchet with the big music labels and agreed to a new pricing model in exchange for...
Songs will cost either 0.69, 0.99 or 1.29 Euro in the future.
Every song will be DRM free and 256 kbps AAC encoded (also known as "iTunes Plus").
Unfortunately it was not mentioned whether the 9.99 Euro model for a complete album would be maintained, but I argue this bastion will fall, too, and we will see album prices of up to 12 or 14 Euro in the future.
So, this is good and bad news.
I will later check how much it would currently cost me to upgrade my library of purchased songs to iTunes Plus...
Oh. And you can now also buy songs with the iPhone, if you have only a network connection.
Before this was only supported when you had Wifi access.
Well...
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