MacWorld 2006 Keynote Address Review

By Kelmon

Hot on the heels of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2006 is the annual Mac gathering that is MacWorld (Jan 9-13 2006). MacWorld is, frankly, just another tradeshow, albeit one for a single computing platform, but is well attended by Apple themselves and typically used to make some big announcements/product releases. The 2006 event was no different with Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, taking the stage on Tuesday morning and this article takes a look at what was announced and attempts to take a view of the address after having taken a step back. Some of the stuff announced was expected, some stuff was missing, and one announcement came out of left-field and isn’t pleasing some new Mac owners…

First of all, if you have about 1-hour and 30-minutes to spare, it’s well worth watching the keynote yourself, ignoring my article, and making your own judgements. You can watch it as a streaming QuickTime broadcast here and really appreciate how cool some of the stuff announced is by seeing it in action.

The Hype/Rumour Mill In Overdrive

Something that’s worth noting, and I can’t remember if anything like this exists for any other computing platform, is that Apple has a really active rumours community that attempts to both predict and discover what Apple and its partners are working on before they are announced. This community is fronted by the likes of Think Secret, Apple Insider, and it should come as no surprise that the rumour mill had again been set into overdrive with all sorts of suggestions. Given the rumoured potential for the product announcements the keynote address was always going to be an anticlimax. Some of the rumours were hardly rumours at all (the annual refresh of the iLife software is hardly a shock) but some were massive with predictions of Mac Mini-based Media Centers (to borrow the term from Microsoft), massive plasma screen televisions running OS X, and downloadable movies based around the .mac subscription service (more on this later for those who have not heard of it). In the end the products actually announced were pretty tame in comparison but I’ll let you, the reader, be a judge of this (hey, that’s what the comments section is for, right?).

First off, let me start by saying that Steve Jobs is actually pretty entertaining to watch/listen to in one of his addresses. In the comments section of Chris’s article on CES 2006 I bemoaned the lack of public speaking talent exhibited by most of the people delivering keynote addresses at CES. If you want to see what I mean, check out Google’s Larry Page’s address as it’s a shocker. The ability of the speaker doesn’t mean anything about the products themselves (Windows Vista’s abilities as an operating system is not going to be affected by how irritating I find Bill Gate’s voice) but having someone relatively entertaining to listen to helps when they have over an hour of material to get through. Steve Jobs, in this respect, does a bang-up job and I wish some of the others would learn from this.

The Boring Bits & iPod

So, to the address itself. The first 30-minutes of the address has nothing much to do with the Mac platform but rather talks about how well the Apple retail stores are doing, how well the iTunes Music Store is doing, and how well the iPod is selling. I think, much like most of the audience, that we don’t really care that much. It’s great to know that Apple, as a company, is performing really well at the moment but given that it’s MacWorld, we pretty much just want to know about what Apple is planning to do now and in the future, particularly in relation to the Mac platform. One product announcement that came from this section was that a new accessory will be launched by Apple for it’s “license to print money” that is the iPod – a remote control/FM radio tuner with headphones that connects to either an iPod Nano or iPod with Video. I know that one of the differences cited between the iPod and many other MP3 players is that quite a lot of the others provide an FM radio tuner and I guess Apple was listening to this. In typical fashion the product itself looks good, has a really nice looking interface for tuning stations on the iPod screen, but in all honesty I really wasn’t impressed. The biggest reason for this is that I don’t tend to listen to the radio (OK, in Belgium I don’t understand the language yet so that’s a problem) and I favour Podcasts. The other reason is that the product costs $50 for something that most other players provide for free.

Thankfully, the iPod Radio Remote announcement marked the last thing we heard about the iPod as Steve Jobs announced that the rest of the keynote would be dedicated to the Mac; queue sighs of relief all round.

iLife with iWeb Rocks

Next up on the list of announcements was the worst-kept secret product announcement, the annual refresh of iLife, now released as iLife ’06. I still maintain that iLife’s provision with every new Mac is one of the best reasons to buy a Mac in the first place because it is just so beautifully designed, integrated and useful in today’s digital world. For those who have not come across iLife before, the product suite consists of iTunes (music/radio/Podcast management/playback software), iPhoto (picture management/adjustment software), iMovie HD (home movie creation software), iDVD (DVD creation software) and GarageBand (sort of music studio). Each year we see an update to this set of software, occasionally with the introduction of a new member, and the suite continues to mature with last year’s offering by far and away well worth the asking price. This year sees the suite updated to make sharing much easier and movies much cooler. The following is my quick breakdown of the major aspects for the updates to each product:

• iPhoto has been updated so that it’s faster, better able to manage large picture collections (up to 250,000 pictures from 25,000), and easier to use for adjusting pictures that you’ve taken (note: this isn’t Photoshop but it is good enough for common tasks). However, the best feature is Photocasting which is essentially Podcasting but for photographs. In a nutshell, Photocasting allows you to broadcast a feed of pictures that friends/family can subscribe to either through their own version of iPhoto or via any RSS reader.
• iMovie HD has been given a whole bunch of animated templates that can be added to your movies to make them look much more interesting and professional. These themes are basically a static picture being panned/zoomed with drop-zones for you to add your movie content. It doesn’t sound like much but it was amazingly cool to watch in the demonstration.
• iDVD wasn’t really updated but does now include the ability to make widescreen menus and create DVDs in an automated fashion if you don’t want to spend the time laying out the content manually.
• GarageBand has been updated to include a Podcast studio that will allow the user to record their speech (including, although not demonstrated, interviews conducted across the iChat instant messenger), add soundtracks/jingles that are “ducked” beneath your voice automatically when a vocal track is playing, and add pictures that change throughout the course of the Podcast.
• iTunes itself wasn’t discussed since it is available as a free download.

However, this year also saw the introduction of a new application in the package called iWeb. Due to a cock-up at Apple’s website this product was accidentally pre-announced when a link to its support page appeared last week but no one really knew what it was. The answer is that it’s sort of Dreamweaver-light. Basically, iWeb allows users to create websites quickly using drag-n-drop and Apple-created templates. The websites created can provide “normal” content, photographs that can be viewed using a cool AJAX-based photo viewer, blogs and Podcasts. It’s not going to create an award-winning or highly creative website but it does allow the stuff that you’ve created in the other iLife products to be broadcasted to the world very simply and produces some pretty impressive looking results.

For those who already own a Mac and therefore wish to buy a retail copy of iLife ’06, it’ll cost you $79.00 or $99.00 for a family-pack license that can be installed on up to 5 Macs.

The iLife ’06 demonstration clearly demonstrated that Apple wants to increase subscriptions to, and justify, their .Mac set of web services. .Mac is a $99.95 per year subscription service that provides stuff that you can commonly find elsewhere on the Internet for free, although generally not all in the same place. The principle offerings of the service include e-mail, an online disk called (surprise) iDisk with 1GB of capacity, system backup software, synchronisation services and, recently, groupware facilities. The price is pretty steep although the service is pretty convenient and I’ve been pretty happy with it for 2-years now. With iLife ’06, however, the service becomes much more useful because it is necessary to take advantage of some of the new features, such as iPhoto’s Photocasting, iMovie’s Video Podcasting, and (shock) GarageBand’s plain-vanilla Podcasting. Further, iWeb as an application is pretty much useless without a .Mac subscription, as you can’t upload your content elsewhere. I can see why Apple has done this but I’m sure that to a non-.Mac subscriber it looks like cheeky way of “forcing” them to subscribe since iLife ’06 is a much less compelling upgrade without one.

iWork Doesn’t Rock

Making a brief mention in the keynote was iWork ’06, the combination of Pages 2 (Word-lite word processor with pretty cool templates) and Keynote 3 (a respectable presentations application that gives PowerPoint a run for its money). Nothing much was said about the applications which have generally received poor sales and a cursory glance at the website suggests that not much has changed. Pages 2, for example, has gained the equivalent of Track Changes, simple image editing in the document with masking, and 3D graphs. The same it true of Keynote 3 with the addition of cinematic transitions and new templates but not much else. What continues to annoy the most with iWork is that it is still missing the critical spreadsheet application that means you still need to buy MS Office:mac or download OpenOffice. While both Pages and Keynote have added the ability for simple calculations to be performed in tables created, it is not the same as Excel and an omission that many were hoping would be fixed this year. iWork ’06 will retail for $79.00 or, like iLife ’06, at $99.00 for the 5-license family-pack. Again, however, I’ll be giving this one a miss and wondering why Apple continues to drop the ball so badly here.

Just Bought A New G5 iMac? Oh Dear…

OK, next up is what I see to be the most controversial aspect of the keynote, the announcement of the first Intel-based Mac. The audience, while expecting the Intel-based Macs to be announced/released, were obviously shocked into almost complete silence when Jobs declares that the first system will be the iMac. There’s 2 ways of looking at the announcement:

• The Good: The new Intel-based iMac costs the same as the current G5-based iMac but contains a faster dual-core processor and upgraded graphics (128MB ATI X600 to ATI X1600 with option of 256MB). The overall system performance is rated as 2- to 3-times the performance of the current G5-based system.
• The Bad: If I were someone who paid $1,700 at Christmas for the new G5 iMac then, personally, I’d be pissed. Postings seen on some websites seem to suggest that there are some very unhappy people and I don’t blame them.

All demonstrations conducted so far during the presentation were revealed to have been performed on the Intel-based machine and all software demonstrated will be available as Universal Binaries (i.e. compiled for both PowerPC and Intel). A further demonstration showed Photoshop CS2, a non-Universal Binary application, running on the Intel and being translated to Intel code by the Rosetta translation/emulation software seamlessly in the background. The admission is that it’s not fast enough for professional use (something that will put off the pros since Adobe isn’t releasing an update until the next full release of Photoshop) but it was certainly fully functional and fast enough for me. Apple’s own professional suite of applications (such as Final Cut Pro) will apparently be released as Universal Binaries in March while Microsoft promised to release Universal Binary updates for Office:mac 2004 along with other enhancements (such as, finally, Spotlight support in Entourage!).

MacBook - Iffy Name But Oh Baby…

Given the letdown that the iMac announcement seemed to be (twice as fast and for the same money but it obviously wasn’t what was expected/wanted by the audience given the near silence), Jobs finally unveiled what was wanted in the famous (at least in Mac-land) “Just one more thing…” that always seems to appear in his keynotes at the end. After years of waiting for a kick-ass laptop (the mythical G5-based PowerBook), the MacBook Pro was announced with (in the high-end machine) a 1.83GHz Intel Duo processor, 1GB DDR2, 667MHz FSB, 256MB ATI Mobility X1600 graphics, etc. In addition to the “standard” specifications, the laptop includes the scrolling trackpad, high definition screens and impact-sensor introduced in the last G4 PowerBooks, and adds both an integrated iSight webcam, the Media Center-like FrontRow software with remote control, and a patent-pending power adapter, called MagSafe, that connects magnetically and disconnects under tension to prevent tripped-over-power-cable accidents. The high-end machine romps home at a mighty $2499.00 and so isn’t for those seeking either low-end or cheap laptop. However, with performance quote to be 4- to 5-times better than the last generation of G4-based PowerBooks the MacBook Pro thrashes my current laptop and is most definitely on the shopping list for when a 17” version is released a bit later in the year. Curiously, however, Apple is not quoting battery life figures for the new MacBook Pro seems to be declining to comment on the issue, which isn’t a good sign.

General Conclusions

I typically enjoy Steve Jobs’ keynote addresses and this one was pretty much no different, although I feel that we can dispense with much of the financial information at the start. In terms of product announcements, iLife ’06 is on my shopping list when I pass through Sheffield’s new Apple Store in March as it looks to be a fantastic update for an already stellar suite of applications. iWork ’06 continues to disappoint and is in dire need of that spreadsheet application (one called Numbers is apparently in the works but evidentially not ready for primetime yet). The Intel-based iMac appears to be great value for money but will undoubtedly annoy new iMac G5 owners who thought their product to be future-proof for longer than about 2-months. The MacBook Pro, despite its alien name, gets my vote for Best Announcement since it is almost exactly what I have been waiting for, although the UK price is more than I was expecting.

• Highlights: MacBook Pro and iLife ‘06
• Low Points: iWork ’06 and need for .mac subscription to make iLife ’06 cool