Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

just one more thing

Today was the big Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld Expo. MacCentral has a nice round-up of the new product announcements.

The big news: The new MacBook Pro laptop, powered by an Intel processor and, according to Apple, four times faster than the two-year-old PowerBook G4 I’m using to type up this blog entry. As Dari might say, it’s dead sexy. Brighter screen, built-in iSight camera (forget video chat … updating my Delicious Library just got that much easier), remote control … pretty spiffy. The new MagSafe magnetic power cord alone makes me want to upgrade to the MacBook; I can’t say how many times I’ve narrowly missed disaster when I’ve accidentally tripped over my existing power cord, nearly pulling my laptop off whatever it’s been resting on. The MagSafe cable cleanly detaches from the machine when it encounters resistance, rather than stubbornly dragging the attached computer along with it.

Side observation: While my PowerBook has two FireWire ports — one 400 and one 800 — the new MacBook only has one FireWire 400 port. Given the popularity of FireWire (not to mention Macs) among the video editing set, I’m surprised that Apple has scaled down its FireWire offerings, even on the highest-end MacBook. Then again, given the murmurs that Apple may be trying to slowly kill FireWire, I suppose I should be grateful that they left any FireWire ports at all — even if it is the slower port. (Granted, I only use the 800 port to connect to my external La Cie drive; all my other FireWire peripherals are FW 400. But I’d think the 800 port would be most useful to the pro video folks.)

Other product announcements: An updated iLife suite, including the new iWeb program for creating Web sites and blogs. I was suspicious when I first heard about it — I’ve been thoroughly unimpressed by the results of those “generate your own Web page” tools offered by .Mac — but I’m impressed by the new Apple-designed templates in iWeb. We’ll see how clean their code is. Meanwhile, I hope the new iPhoto really is as speedy as promised; it’s been a dog since the first version was released. And while I’m intrigued by all the blogging (text blogs, photoblogs, video and audio podcasts) features in the updated iLife applications, I wonder if all the blatant tie-ins to .Mac preclude users from using these features on independent webhosts.

More Apple fun:

• Kottke.org: 50 Fun Things to Do with Your iPod
• Cult of Mac: Virtual tour of the Apple campus in Cupertino, Calif. (01/05/06)
• News.com: Apple’s closing stock price today, after introducing the new Intel-based Macs, was $80.86. And I feel as though I must wallow in my geekitude for knowing offhand why that number is significant and marvelling at the coincidence.