Final MWSF Thoughts
Posted January 6th, 2009 @ 01:52pm by Erik J. Barzeski
iLife '09: Couldn't care less about iMovie. Don't use it. Haven't for years. iPhoto - I use Aperture for my "serious" shots - iPhoto is the dumping ground for the photos Carey takes with the P&S. Will I have to go back and add "places" and "faces" to everything? I hope not. How many cameras have GPS in them? I guess earlier is better than later, even if it's a minority.
iWork '09: I don't care about Keynote (that may change, however), and I like what I saw from Numbers and Pages. Pages still uses a drawer, though - I saw that.
iWork Online: Charging for it? Seriously? But if it works really well it may be a very cool thing. Still not sure I'll want to pay for it though, on top of two full MobileMe accounts in this household already.
17" MacBook Pro: Don't care. Never did. Wonder if Apple can sell their battery technology to Tesla. Run your car from a single 17" MacBook Pro for up to 200 miles!
DRM-free: Sure, but at $0.30/song and 30% per album? Isn't that like an early adopter fee?
Phil: He did fine, but he didn't have much material to work with. We've had pretty boring Stevenotes too.
Overall: Zzzzzzzz. Which is fine - I'm not as caught up in the "excitement" as I used to be. If anything, this expo saved me a lot of money on hardware. On software it's another story: I must admit I'm feeling awfully nickel-and-dimed today:
- $0.99 for a stupid Keynote remote application.
- $?? for iwork.com access after the beta (when MobileMe is not exactly the best value these days)
- $100.42 (that's a lot of nickels and dimes) to upgrade my library, despite iTunes Plus songs costing the same $0.99 as when I purchased the music?
Blarg.
Donate Life
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 3:31pm #
I'm feeling the same way. I'll check my "upgrade price" for my iTunes Library when I get home, but I'm sure it's in the same ballpark. Hooray for DRM free though, but most likely in AAC , not MP3...
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 3:49pm #
[quote comment="52059"]Hooray for DRM free though, but most likely in AAC , not MP3...[/quote]
Of course it's AAC, and Apple wraps it in just enough of a layer that the Xbox 360 and PS3 won't play it (via Rivet or copied onto a USB drive, etc.).
Posted 07 Jan 2009 at 10:01am #
It's a great step forward, removing the DRM, but I still won't be buying any songs from iTunes. Most the time I can buy the physical CD for less.
Posted 07 Jan 2009 at 12:05pm #
I have found that Keynote is good for precision layout (I don't have an image editor or other good page layout software). I made an 8.5x11 blank page template and then put text on to print out CD Labels and other assorted labels.
Kind of like a poor man's single page PageMaker.