MacWorld 2009 Keynote Wrapup

I wasn’t there and I didn’t see it live, but I was bored anyway. It was a boring keynote becuase there was nothing to really announce. You can add all desktop Mac systems to the list of things Apple wouldn’t announce. All we got was iLife ‘09, iWork ‘09, some updates to iTunes, and a new unified chassis 17″ MacBook Pro. Somehow I’m starting to get a sense of why Apple has chosen to no longer participate, though I think its the wrong decision, and I will explain in another piece. First, however, a brief look at what Phil Schiller announced in Steve Jobs place.

iLife ‘09 gets a new iPhoto which incorporates geotagging and face recognition for automated image tagging. iMovie gets a new interface layout, image stabilization, and some other geegaws. GarageBand took the cake, though, with the integration of musical training courses. Some are included and more can be purchased online for a very reasonable fee (US$5). They also got some rather big names to teach people how to play including Sting and Sarah McLachlan. This alone is well worth the price.

iWork ‘09 also gets some significant updates. Personally, I’m a huge fan of Pages. Keynote and Numbers not so much, but then I’m not out doing presentations or crunching figures. The big updates are to Keynote and Numbers. Keynote gets a range of new transitions and animations as a new animation tool which automates movements of objects. Numbers get over 250 new calculations and functions to better round it out. Pages gets updated, too, but its was already kick ass to begin with.

iTunes gets a few new tricks, too. The big thing people will like is that you can now download music from the Apple Music Store directly via Wi-Fi or 3G. Apple is also taking the entire catalog DRM-free. Most of them are there already, but they’ll have the rest done by the end of the year. There’s also a new pricing scheme, now offering tracks at US$0.69, $0.99, and $1.29, depending on what the record companies want to charge.

Finally, there’s a new 17″ unified chassis MacBook Pro. It looks just like the 15″ model, just bigger. Apple decided to embed the battery into the case and made it 40% larger to compensate for the fact that you can’t change it out. Schiller went on to suggest that you could eek 8 hours out of the lappy. The new US$2800 17″ lapmonster sports a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, up to 8GBs of RAM, a 320GB HDD (with 256GB SSD optional), and NVIDIA’s GeForce 9600M GT video chipset.