Apple announced it’s new products for Q1, at least. iLife looks cool. Snooze on iWork. And the top end MacBook Pro that was left out of the Sept ‘08 upgrades was upgraded with a very cool custom battery that gives it 8 hr. Unfortunately, it didn’t get a Quad Core CPU. iTunes goes DRM free for more money. This really highlights the fact the DRM is a feature only for the copyright holder and is an obstacle for the consumer. Something artificial that you have to pay not to have. Wait, that sounds like protection racket.
I was hoping for Apple TV, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro updates. Particularly, the first two are looking very long in the tooth. The desktop Macs really have to wait for Intel to make lots of new quad core chips, which’ll be a couple of months. Also, iMacs were left out of the upgrades that the laptops received in Sept. The one where a slide was presented showing just how dog slow the iMac video cards are. I betcha this is all, because of the difficulty nVidia has had with shipping low defect chips. If so, Apple has got to be plenty pissed that many of it’s product lines are delayed, because of it.
Overall good, but boring. Show me the products that I know are going to be updated or tell me when. I don’t want an Apple TV that is obsolete 1 month later. Which is exactly what could happen in the next three months.
BTW, I’m loving the G4 Cube after the upgrade. It’s all back in it’s case, lying on its face, and running great. A few quirks like forget about using sleep mode, and the limited USB 1.1 bus can get drastically overloaded, forget running Leopard, and Adobe doesn’t know how to code Flash for G4s. It looks cool, runs pretty stable, and the CD through USB 1.1 scans and burns just fine. This has been my main computer for the past 3 months.