Mac Event

So today was a big Mac event. They announced iLife '11, Facetime for Mac, gave a brief preview of OS X 10.7 aka Lion and announced the new MacBook Air. Here are some thoughts.

The iLife upgrade seems like a pretty reasonable evolution. All I use is iPhone and I like the new stuff but it just seems that stuff will be easier and nicer and not that there's much new to do. The changes to iMovie are more significant with better audio editing and face detection in video. The movie trailer stuff is cute, but I'd be surprised if anyone used it more than three times. Maybe teenagers will post tons of them to facebook. The Garage Band stuff is nice, maybe I'll learn how to play keyboards (haven't played since 8th grade).

I've installed the facetime beta and used it once. It's fine, but I probably won't use much if at all. I don't use it on my phone and I don't see any improvement on using iChat video with my sister.

I'm not so sure about the Air. First off the base 2GB isn't enough, so plan on $100 more for the 4GB option (which seems reasonable for an Apple memory upgrade). While flash mem is great, it is expensive. 128GB total storage? Not so sure. If you go 256GB then you're at $1699 and why not get a small macbook or mb pro for about $500 less (and with a faster processor)? If you go smaller and use it as a second machine, then you have to sync stuff and syncing with an iPad is much easier. I guess if you don't have much music or photos or video then maybe 128GB is ok and it is tiny.

Before the event, I thought the app store rumors were lame, but after Steve announced it, it made perfect sense. For small indie developers, setting up a site and dealing with licensing and upgrades (even with sparkle) is a pain. Also, the discoverability of apps for regular users that don't scan all the sites/reviews will help the developers a lot. It's optional, but provided Apple's fees are small (much less than the 30% they take for iOS apps) and restrictions are minor, it could be very nice.

The rest of Lion features weren't that interesting and seemed mostly logical or dumb. The green button now does what everybody thinks it does (full screen), expose/spaces is expanded a little. The launcher doesn't seem any nicer than the dock and most people don't have a lot of apps (maybe the store changes that). Folders in the launcher that look like iOS looked dumb. I still expect some big features like spotlight or time machine in Lion.