Well, I’m home sick today (the lymph nodes in my neck are considerably swollen, and my whole face hurts), so I decided to watch the Macworld Expo on my Powerbook. It was a nice way to spend some time in between naps & taking medicine.
Well, the Keynote by Steve Jobs has now come & gone, and it left us with some new products. The highlights are the iLife updates along with GarageBand, for $50! Wow, that is kick-ass. Also, the upgraded Xserves and Xserve RAID is pretty amazing, and very competitively priced. Steve’s jab about Linux was also pretty funny (“Unlike linux, you can be a mere mortal and use this thing”). I personally don’t think Linux is all that difficult with most things, especially with Redhat’s GUI admin tools, but I think he has a point. OS X Server is pretty damn easy to use.
I feel overall let down by the Expo though. The new iPods are here, but the top of the line models weren’t upgraded at all. The 10 GB model moved up to 15 GB, which makes the 20 GB model seem rather overpriced. Also, the iPod minis are here, but the pricing of them just doesn’t make sense to me. I like the general concept of them, but I was hoping for a $100-$200 model. Pricing these things at $250 makes them only $50 away from the low-end iPod, so what’s the point? I was hoping they would at least match the price of similar low-end players, or break them. I should have known better, Apple doesn’t traditionally like to be a loss-leader.
And of course, no upgrades to the LCDs. I want a 23 inch Cinema Display, but I’ve never been a fan of the plastic, pinstripe look that was introduced with the older PowerMacs and Cubes. I was hoping for the rumors of a new Cinema Display enclosure, and bumping up the USB ports on them from 1.1 to 2.0, but alas, no such update. This leaves me in need of a monitor, and not knowing what to do. Do I wait? Do I just buy one now? I’m confused. I suppose I’ll wait a few more months and see what happens.
In the mean time, I’m going to go order a 40 GB iPod.