Lion, Far From Winter
It seems to be the way of things that I put up a few thoughts whenever a major Apple keynote rolls around, so I might as well keep it going.
My first thought, when this keynote was announced as “Back to to the Mac,” was, “Thank God. Make all these people who think Apple is going to let the Mac atrophy just shut up already.” The first major point made bears this out, that even though the Mac business has become a smaller portion of Apple in comparison to iOS stuff, by itself it has continued to grow. In other words, halo effect aside, if the iPhone had never been born, or spun off into a different company or something, Apple and the Mac would have continued to grow, to gain in popularity, and gain in market share. It’s hardly a dwindling concern for Apple.
iLife stuff looks really great. Just like everybody else, I can’t wait to play with that Movie Trailers feature.1 Ever year I put together a little 10-minute video of the kids for the extended family, and this would be great fun to do something with.
FaceTime for the Mac, pretty well expected. The other night they used FaceTime on Brothers & Sisters. They didn’t call it by name—they said “switch to video”—but it was clear they were using iPhone 4s. I don’t see people in mainstream TV shows running around with Droids, do you?
Likewise, the general UI innovations derived from iOS didn’t surprise me (though before the keynote I didn’t clue in to the double-meaning of “Back to the Mac”—very clever), but my jaw hit the floor when Steve announced the Mac App Store. I never thought in a million years we would see it in Mac OS X. A future version of the Mac OS, perhaps, one more fully based on iOS, but not on the current decade-old OS we have now.
Looking back, has been clear that the Dashboard was a UI and functionality progenitor of the iPhone OS. In terms of widgets, they have always had a sort of “App Store” on the desktop, but it was really kind of behind the scenes, and after Tiger became old hat, it sort of lost its importance. Kind of like a hobby, if you will. My wife loves the Dashboard for its quick look at certain things, like the weather, but even though I was impressed by it at first, I never use it now.
Now I think it has come full circle, through it’s transformation into a full-fledged UI metaphor in iOS, back to the Mac desktop as a real tool for real apps. Nice. Now if we can just have fully universal apps that work on the iPad and the Mac, which we purchase once, and that would be rad.
The “One more thing…” was somewhat weakened by the fact that everybody knew there were new MacBook Airs2 coming. I love that there’s an 11-inch model, so the 12-inch PowerBook people can have their cake and eat it, too.
As I was watching the excellent coverage by Jacqui Cheng, and the MacBook Air came up, I thought to myself, “This has to be at the $1,000 price point. It’s the only way it is going to fly or make sense.” The iPad has set the expectation that smaller and more mobile, in comparison to a full MacBook Pro, also has to be cheaper. And so it was, and there was much rejoicing. I actually think I punched the air. It is always great news when the entry level machine in a category is using the hot new technology. Clearly they were just keeping that white MacBook on life support so they could have something at the $999 level, while they waited for the tech and economies of scale to get them to this point.
Bravo, I say. It’s been a long time since Apple had a presentation that was all about the Mac, and I think they hit it out of the park. Very satisfying.
- Though I may have to. I haven’t checked, but I suspect iLife 11 will require Snow Leopard, and I’m still on 10.5 for AppleTalk printer reasons. ↩
- Okay, this really bugs me, grammatically. It ought to be MacBooks Air. iPods touch. iPhones 4. Courts martial. Inspectors general. Sorry, that’s just how English works. ↩