October 20 Apple event highlights

A few things of note from yesterday’s Apple event. Keynote video can be seen here.

Two new MacBook Air models introduced: an 11-inch and a 13-inch model with on-board flash memory and beefed-up battery life. It seems clear that Apple is moving toward phasing out hard drives on all of its laptops as flash component prices come down.

New iLife ’11 software suite. Nice upgrades to iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand. iLife will come installed on all new Macs for free, or a $49 upgrade if you already have it. If you use iPhoto and/or iMovie this looks like a worthwhile upgrade, with some great new capabilities in both apps. The new audio and video editing tools in iMovie are really impressive, making it easy to create professional-looking productions, with integrations for uploading videos directly to YouTube, Facebook and Vimeo.

Preview of Mac OS X Lion. Release targeted for summer 2011. Apple calls this ‘Back to the Mac’ as they are taking some of what’s been popular on the iPad interface and bringing it to the Mac OS.

A few changes coming with this OS X release:

  • Mac App Store. The iPhone and iPad have an App Store for quick and easy downloading and installation of apps, so why not the Mac as well? This model could be very successful as it will give Mac users a convenient way to find applications they want, a notification system to let them know when updates are available, and customer reviews to see what other users have to say about the apps. Apple will offer the same 70/30 revenue split with developers as they do today with iPhone and iPad apps, and traditional application sales and installation has not been eliminated — the App Store will just be another distribution channel. The more I think about this approach the more I like it, because although installing applications on any computer is generally easy, it’s not always intuitive — and even less so for those who don’t have much experience with computers. The iPhone/iPad model just seems perfect for most situations: select an app, click the Install button, done. The average user shouldn’t have to deal with file systems or compressed archives or virtual disk volumes for something as trivial as installing an app.
  • Launchpad. An iPad-style interface for organizing and launching Mac apps, in addition to the existing Dock method.
  • Full-screen apps. Another iPad-like feature, taking some apps to a full-screen view to maximize the use of monitor real estate and reduce unnecessary clutter on the screen. I think this will be especially useful for working on photos, videos and word processing tasks. I frequently use Aperture in full-screen mode for photo editing and I think it’s a good feature that could extend well to other applications.
  • Mission Control. This is a trackpad gesture-based feature that combines some of the functionality of Exposé, Spaces, Dashboard and full-screen apps. Apple is really pushing the touch interface here — learn a few simple swipe gestures on the trackpad and reduce the number of times you have to grab the mouse for common tasks. This seems like both a bold step and an obvious one. Millions of people are accustomed to using a touch interface on mobile devices today, so the way we physically interact with technology is already undergoing a subtle transition. I think that little features like this could play out in a much bigger way than might seem obvious today.

FaceTime for Mac. FaceTime was recently introduced as part of iOS4 on the latest iPhone 4. It’s basically like Skype video-calling but only worked over WiFi between iPhone 4 devices. With FaceTime for Mac you can install the app and, if you have a Mac laptop with a built-in iSight camera or an external camera, make FaceTime video calls between iPhone and a Mac. iOS 4.1 or later is required. FaceTime for Mac beta download is available now.

Posted: October 21st, 2010
Filed under: Apple, Hardware, Software Tags: , , , , | No Comments »

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