Watching the live feed for this year’s keynote. Goog things are expected to be announced by Stevo.
- There’s over 60 000 of us watching this online. Great signal, image is pretty shart and doesn’t skip.
- Look back on 20 years of Mac. Showing of the legendary Super Bowl ad.
- Demo of Final Cut Express 2.0
- Video of the G5 Cluster at Virginia Tech, followed by launch of Xserve double 2GHz G5 and bigger Xserve Raid
- iLife ‘04: iPhoto 4.0 (supposedly quicker), iMovie 4.0 (import movies from iSight), iDVD 4.0 and adding Garage Band to make/record music on your Mac which includes software instruments and live recording. Demoed by John Mayer! I think some people are going to go nuts with this one. Why did they make it darker than the other brushed steel aps though?
- 730 000 iPods sold in the last quarter. 10Gb iPod goes to 15Gb for the same price. New ad.
- and… disapointment. There is a new iPod mini, it is 4Gb, it does come in colors but it’s 249$. 249$! US! The 15Gb is 299$, wtf? They were rumored to be 100-150$. And they’ll be available worldwide only in April. Well that just saved me some money. Doh!
- No new Macs, no new Powerbooks, no new iBooks, no iBox.
[Later] I’ve just gone through a bunch of blogs, close to 20 of which mentionned the keynote and they all agree (except one I think); iPod minis are a miss. And it seems the brits are getting screwed on the exchange rate, expect something similar for Canada.
[2004/01/27] Comparison of the iPod mini with it’s intended competition. They seem to be right on target.
3 Comments
The iPod mini is a nifty lil’ thing. But the point is, you’re paying for the design, and compared to high-end flash-RAM MP3 players, it’s a big step up. Like, 1600% more capacity compared to the largest Flash-based Rio player. It could be cheaper though – $199 sounds about right. Good time to be in school, there’s a good edu. discount.
By the way, did you notice the “color theme selector” from the iPod page is gone, replaced with the link to the iPod Mini? I think that was how they determined what colours to make them — by how many times people selected which alternate stylesheets :)
Of course, the real news is G5 Xserve in a 1U box! And a 3.5TB RAID! It’s not as sexy, sure, but this is how Macs get into the IT department…
I agree with everything you’re saying except for the price. I know it was probably too much to ask for to have something around 100$ but I think 199$ (249$ CA) isn’t just about right, it’s just about the maximum for that market. 150$ to 175$ US is more like it. Also, once your at 249$ why stop there and not go to 299$ for almost 4 times more? The mini isn’t that much smaller anyway.
Well, I have an iPod in my head anyway, which I got for free, and has infinite capacity, so there!
Thing is, the UI is a bit screwy, and it tends to get stuck on songs I don’t necessarily want to hear, but hey.