Keynote thoughts

January 6, 2004 at 12:03 pm Mike 8 comments

Maybe it was the overhyped expectations, but today’s keynote was probably one of the least exciting ever. Steve’s Reality Distortion Field seemed to be broken.

Although Office 2004 and the iLife updates look great and GarageBand is very cool, there was really nothing that made you want to run out and buy it immediately.

The G5 XServe & XServe RAID are great improvements, but there were no new machines for most average users. I’m sure everyone was surprised that Apple didn’t introduce a new model for the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh.

The iPod mini is much too expensive. It needs to sell for under $200, especially since the full 15G iPod costs only $50 more.

Share your thoughts here.

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Comments

Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

Agree with you on almost all points… although all the rumor sites, etc. spoil the fun by getting almost 100% of the stuff right.

The iPod is waaaaay too expensive… $149-$199 would have been reasonable… why would anyone buy that instead of the 15G? colors? that’s not enough reason….

Anyways, iLife stuff is great, but I am not a musician so the GarageBand app (which took 45 minutes to introduce) wasn’t all that exciting for me…

Well… I guess have to wait till WWDC 2004
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

Yeah I was hoping for something to put me a little further in debt before I graduate in May. Could care less about garageband and am really just glad that I never fully upgraded to last years version of ilife.

$149-199 would have been awesome, my friend just bought a flash player with 256KB for ~$180. Glad that he didn’t head my warnings to wait until after Jan. 6th.
Any great 3rd party apps or products going to be announced through out the week??
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

Sometimes the biggest announcements aren’t realized until months later, if not years. That is what this one is.
iLife is the culimination of Apple’s pro applications migrating down to the creative consumer. This MacWorld establishes Apple as the dominent force in creative computing. For example, families that wish to create movies, music, photo albums, DVD’s what ever media they wish can now do so easily on a computer. It wasn’t real easy to ALL of those things, now it is.
Jobs was off on his description of iLife. It isn’t MS Office for your life, its MS Office for your kids. And this isn’t some dumbed now application that kids will stop using because it patronizes or confuses them. Its a tool that enables their creativity.

Its no longer about us, its about them. The future of computing.

I envy that.
Lief
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

I’m simply reminded of the cube. It was a beautiful idea but you could buy a more powerful mac for just a few hundred dollars more. Now the mini pod is also very nice to look at but way overpriced. Why in the world would anyone not spend fifty dollars more to almost quadruple the capacity?
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

I didn’t think that that the Keynote was outstanding, but it was very good. I am not a real musician, but I love listening to and editing it. Now I can make my own songs for iMovie or iDVD ROYALTY FREE! The mini iPod’s major advantage is that it can be used during heavy activity (vibration) such as jogging. Many, many people want to exercise with their iPod, but it is hard drive based and is not well suited for this purpose. I am sure Apple was worrying about cannabalizing current iPod sales as well, so they priced it at $249 (giving them room to drop the price to $199 in 6 months). It is not over-priced, because Rio announced a similar 4GB player today at the exact same price point. The updates to the other iLife apps are very welcome, specifically 25,000 photos in iPhoto, new text effects in iMovie, 2 hour DVDs in iDVD, and iTunes just rocks as it is. I don’t consider this MacWorld disappointing at all. IMHO, if you want disappointing, try MWNY 2002
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

I was just about to buy a product similar to Garage Band but I would have gotten much less for my money. I also was trying to find another photo application due to iPhoto’s arbitrary limit on photos. I am reserving my copy today. 1/2 of US households have a person currently playing an instrument but all it requires is good taste to compose with this software. I think it would have been cool if they debued Apple Office, but I think this G5 Xserve is going to make a bigger difference. Also I don’t think the price is too much for how much most people listen to music – I personally wouldn’t buy one unless they changed the design to a CD -based MP3 player because iTunes lost my playlists and I don’t want to depend on one piece of software to connect my device to my computer. Remmeber Apple makes most its money off hardware, not software and I am sure it is selling its products for as cheap as it can while maintaining quality.
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

Everyone is comparing the iPod mini to the standard iPod, wondering why a buyer wouldn’t spring the additional $50 for the 15GB iPod. This hurts Apple how, exactly?

The minis are aimed at the guys who want a 256MB flash player; suddenly, for $50 more, they can get a disk-based player with a small form factor and 16 times the capacity; I think lots of folks will go for this. Especially since (as someone else pointed out here) Rio has announced a 4GB flash player at $249. Apple is exactly at the right price point, it seems to me.
Written by Anonymous about 2010 years ago.

“Many, many people want to exercise with their iPod, but it is hard drive based and is not well suited for this purpose.”

The mini iPod is hard drive based. A very tiny hard drive, 4gb of flash memory would have made the unit cost more than a large iPod. I originally thought the mini was flash memory, but all Jobs said was that they were going to compete in that space not that their unit was a flash based player.

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