Apple released two new hardware products and two new software products yesterday.
I want to buy now.
iLife’06 – of course I want to buy it. I’m not stupid! I have kids! I want the motion menus and I want the photocasting. I want to add podcasts to my .Mac account and I want to share the minutiae of my personal life with my family and friends. Of course I do. It’s not going to help me play the guitar any better….but I’m sure the guys in Cupertino are working on that.
iWork’06 – we’re going to buy this, oh yes. We’ve already moved to doing all documentation in Pages and though I do presentations infrequently enough to probably get away with a slideshow of pre-crafted JPEGs. Where’s the pesky spreadsheet module then? Was it bargained away in return for 5 more years shackled by Excel?
iMac – I like the iMac and now it’s twice as fast…for nothing extra. Neat. I wouldn’t buy one for me. It was already a fast machine. Now it’s…uh…faster.
MacBook Pro – well, this is where the lust sets in. I have a 1.67 GHz Powerbook which is about 5 months old. All of the apps I use are already native Intel. And this baby would be 4 times as fast as my current machine? I could switch tomorrow….all I need is the money. More on that later.
Apple seems to have worked around the clock seeing how many people they could annoy at once. Rather than updating the two product lines which haven’t seen much in the way of updates (iBook and Mac mini), they update the two lines which were recently already updated.
Can’t criticise though. They’re selling more Macs every quarter than they EVER have and I predict this quarter is going to be bumper. They obviously know what they are doing.