I think it is best to wait for the big companies to release their Intel based Mac OS software. Emulating Photoshop in Rosetta doesn't sound fun, not from what Jobs said in his keynote. Of course if you do not use software like Photoshop, Maya, etc., then the emulation of PowerPC applications means nothing to you. Microsoft Office, as demonstrated, seems to run just fine under emulation. That in itself is great news.
iLife '06 and iWork '06 were expected, and iWeb was leaked - no big surprises in these product announcements. I still say iLife and iWork need to merge. iWork has not sold well, and would be better suited as part of iLife. That or flesh out iWork with a spreadsheet like application. iWork is still on the lean side with only Pages and Keynote.
iLife '06 took up a large part of the keynote address; it has a lot of new features. iPhoto, iMove, iDVD and GarageBand all saw some great new additions, but GarageBand was the winner with the Podcast Studio. The demo of the new Podcast-centric features in GarageBand 3 really had that "wow" factor that new Apple products have.
Even with the addition of iWeb - the new web page creation tool that grabs content from all of the iLife applications - the iLife '06 suite is still $79. You just can't beat that.
iWork '06 didn't see the additions that iLife did, only subtle tweaks. Pages 2 now sports more Apple-designed templates, 3D charts, freeform objects and masks, mail merge, spreadsheet-like tables (you can perform calculations) and reviewer comments - not unlike Adobe Acrobat. Keynote 3 sees the same new features (sans mail merge), plus new cinematic transitions and themes that support high-defenition displays.
As many people know, no Stevenote is complete without an update on how the Apple Retail Stores, iTunes Music Store, and iPods are doing. The business of Apple is doing great. Not a shock there. The biggest numbers of the day were $5.7 billion in revenue and 14 million iPods sold in the 2005 holiday quarter.
It was also great to see a new first party iPod accessory. The iPod Radio Remote only works on the 5th generation iPod video and the iPod nano. Too bad, because that means I won't be getting one. It is a nice accessory though, and something Apple should have thought of years ago - but why only one-way? Why not allow people to broadcast their iPod to an open radio station too? That would be an even better addition to the mountain of iPod add-ons. After all, its not like third parties don't give you this functionality already. Combine the two.
Article comments
1 - Aaman
Apple's seems to have run out of innovation cojones for the iPod - the big announcement was a remote
The Intel chips means Apple has a second (third? nth?) chance to standardize motherboards and chipsets, as well as open up to third-party makers, a la the IBM PC - too bad it's at the end of the PC age.
2 - Ken Edwards
I really doubt we will see standard motherboards. The chipset from Intel seems like a good bet to be standard, but I think the motherboard is still going to be good old proprietary Apple.