Steve Jobs’s “Keynote” Keynote

Well, another Macworld, another Keynote speech by Steve Jobs. And as much of an Apple enthusiast as I am, I'm having a tough time finding anything to crow about this time around (with one notable exception).

Good news on the conversion of the Mac user base to OS X. It really is a much more intuitive, easy-to-use interface experience, but it does take some getting used to. But with Jaguar, they've got most of the bumps ironed out — not to mention that most apps are now running under X. And with that educator discount for Jaguar (free, that is), maybe my folks will be able to upgrade (Mom’s a teacher).

The updates to the newly-dubbed “iLife” suite — iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD — are interesting, but nothing all that exciting for professionals (although at least they’re not charging for any except iDVD, which they do already).

Final Cut Express might be nice as a backup editing package for an assistant, but I understand that it doesn’t have the offline editing capability I need for working on a laptop. Keynote looks to be a promising jab at Microsoft’s PowerPoint — and I certainly welcome that — but it’s a little early to start predicting anything except that Microsoft ain’t gonna be too happy. We’ll have to see how Safari does, but again, I don’t (yet) see it as a threat to Explorer (nice plug for your other company’s Finding Nemo, Steve). I’d use it over Microsoft’s offering for the pop-up-blocking feature alone (which it shares with my browser of choice, Mozilla), but it is still Beta software; it doesn’t display this page properly, for example.

There was notably no mention of last week’s problematic update to iCal (my entire calendar got corrupted, and I had to restore from a Palm backup card), which was replaced three days later with yet another version. And iSync’s still a little clunky with the Palm.

All in all, the whole presentation was a little lackluster. By no means enough to sink Apple, but nothing that’s going to send the stock price soaring, either.

The one saving grace is the new new 17-inch PowerBook. Wow, is that nice. 1440x900 screen. GeForce 4 Go graphics processor. Airport Extreme. FireWire 800. Integrated Bluetooth. SuperDrive. Fiber-optic backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor. I’m drooling just thinking about it. The only downside to this is that I can’t afford one.

Yet.

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“Classic” reader comments:


William R. Coughlan · Fri, Jan 10th 2003, at 2:25PM

Well, whaddaya know? Turns out it wasn't Safari that was having a problem with this page, it was the code. Should be fixed now.