I knew it would be bad as soon as news broke that La Steve would not be presenting. It was.
Let’s sum up:
New 17″ Macbook Pro – looks nice, but it was hardly unexpected for Apple to extend recent form factor revisions to the larger model. That battery life is very tempting if it holds up to scrutiny, although I’m of mixed feelings about the fact that it’s built-in. *Probably* a good thing, since I never carry two batteries anyway and even keeping another one charged and ready is a hassle.
iWork ‘09 – routine update to Apple’s decent office suite. I am sure it is better, but it’s pretty hard to get excited about an office suite.
iLife ‘09 – routine update with new features. Pretty good, I guess. The automatic video stabilisation in iMovie sounds interesting, if it works. Also, geotagging in iPhoto. Unfortunately, I tend to think that what iLife really needs is to be made faster. All this extra bloat can’t help its speed.
…
And that’s it. I know it was pre-arranged, but one can’t help but think these meagre announcements could have been made at a smaller event, or even just announced on the website.
And I am not very encouraged by the lack of Mac updates. A quick check of MacRumors’ Buyer’s Guide shows that both the Mac Pro and XServe have not been updated for a whole year. The Mac Mini is even worse, at over a year and a half with no update whatsoever. And the Cinema Display monitor range tops them all with an astonishing 643 days since they were last updated. Many *cars* have an update cycle faster than that.
Let’s hope the overdue tsunami of Mac desktop updates hits the shore soon, lest “iPhone will ruin Mac” pessimists start to look accurate in their predictions of a long slow decline for my favourite computing platform.