Macworld Keynote Summary
Have been watching a live feed (with comments) via a twitter page. Armed with strong coffee, peanut butter toast I was almost as excited as if I was there on the ground in San Fran. I didn't set the alarm but woke up because of the heat at 3.30am so decided to stay up and observe!
To summarise we have:-
iLife 09 - with some nice improvements to iPhoto - face recognition and geo-recognition plus syncing both ways to Facebook and Flickr.
Garage Band 09 - now incorporates music lessons for guitar and piano - with additional modules for different artists able to be purchased. (Poppy would LOVE this)
iWork 09 - various improvements
Keynote 09 - various improvements including an iPhone app to remote control presentations
iLife09 is shipping end of January. iWork is available now. To run new applications however you do need Leopard. A package for the all three is being offered for $169US
iWork.com - documents in the 'cloud' - to be shared, collaborated on - free while in beta but moving to paid (similar to google docs which of course is free)
17 inch Mac Book Pro - again the world's thinnest, lightest, 8 hours battery on a single charge - battery is not removable and after 1000 charges you have to pay to get it replaced.Laptop is $2799US and I for one would NOT say 'no thanks'.
iTunes - new price tiers for songs - $69c and $99c (US) with DRM being removed and higher quality files available for the more expensive price if I gather correctly. Benefit of this? Sharing the music you buy from iTunes will be a whole lot easier without restriction from April.
Finally Tony Bennett sang "The Best is Yet to Come" but it seems the punters were disappointed. Last year's keynote set the bar too high I suspect and made everyone hungry for more. The calls of the twitter feed I was watching were mostly for new hardware - iMac, Mac Mini, iPhone Nanom a 'netbook'.... but it seems that it was not to be.
Sadly also this was the final of this particular 'circus' with Apple pulling out of the Macworld show.
