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January 07, 2004
MacWorld Recap
Might as well get some Mac geekery out of the way.
MacWorld SF is going on this week, and Steve Jobs took the stage yesterday to give the expo keynote and introduce the usual bevy of new products. I'm going to try to be somewhat concise here...
iPod mini: This really should have been $199, and I'll wager it'll see that price point by Q3 2004. With only $50 difference between the 4GB iPod mini and the "low-end" 15GB iPod, the smaller size just doesn't seem worth it to me.
GarageBand/iLife '04: GarageBand is a damn cool music tool (mixing, looping, recording, you name it) - and Apple's going to have a lot of aspiring musicians (as well as coffeshop performers and regional bands) buy Macs just to use GB. That it's included free with all new Macs, and only $50 (as part of the iLife bundle) for existing Macs is sweet - maybe the iPod mini's high price is subsidizing GarageBand. The iLife upgrade looks strong, with performance and/or feature improvements on all the apps. iPhoto is no longer a free standalone download, but Apple was about to do this last year with the original introduction of iLife (and backed down at the last moment). Not unexpected, and the low price of iLife (heck, it's $29 edu!) is easy to swallow.
Xserve G5/ Xserve RAID: Boy, this really makes the 1st generation Xserve G4 here at the office look like a noisy pile. The RAID continues to impress, and I think Apple will start selling a lot of these to non-Mac shops.
Xgrid: very understated - but this will do amazing things for academic/research computing when it matures and leaves beta. An ad-hoc, self-managing clustering system that uses spare CPU cycles of local Macs? Come on - suddenly those computing labs, which can sit empty for hours at a time, turn into compute clusters. Apple needs to pimp this to higher-ed, and hard.
We'll probably see updates and speed-bumps to the Macs in the next couple months. There's been an eMac revision in the rumor mill for a while, and the Xserve uses updated G5 procs that should see light in a faster G5 desktop real soon now. Me, I just need to take care of a few financial things (such as a first pass at 2003 taxes), then I'm going to trade in that G4 desktop for a 15" Powerbook...
Posted by jim at January 7, 2004 10:00 AM