Macworld Keynote: My breakdown

The screen itself has a 60% greater color gamut than the previous one, and the same black border seen on other recent Mac laptops. By default, the machine will have a glossy screen. I'm telling you: Pay 50 dollars extra and get the antiglare. Nobody I know likes the glossy screens. You'll also lose the black border, as seen here.

Here's something new for the pro line: a non-removable battery. Apple claims the new battery can get up to 8 hours on a single charge, and can be recharged up to 1000 times. By building it into the computer, Apple says it can make the battery physically 40% bigger, at the same cost and weight. In fact, Apple's put together a great video about it, with video of the manufacturing process. I'm convinced its a great decision by Apple.

One thing I really like is the memory capacity. Up to eight gigabytes can run on this baby, although its unclear whether the memory is user-accessible or not. That's twice as much memory as before. I once again have Mac envy, but it will be a few years before I replace my current excellent MacBook Pro 17-inch, purchased just about a year ago.

And its a heck of a lot better for the planet. Many many environmental fixes have earned the machine an EPEAT Gold Certification.

Everything else in today's keynote was software. Here are the highlights:

iLife '09 contains iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, and iWeb. All are updated.

iPhoto can now sort photos by Faces and Places. iPhoto first uses face detection, to recognize faces. Then it applies face recognition, to find faces that look like the same person. You can then easily add names to your photos, even in large photo libraries. If your camera records GPS info, it will keep an eye on your locations as well. You can add locations manually, if GPS is not part of your arsenal yet, and it can place locations on a Google Map. iPhoto has also had its ability to make slideshows enhanced, with themes and face detection. The editing tools have improved, and sharing in Facebook and Flickr is now built-in.

iMovie now has video stabilization (man, that used to cost thousands!), animated maps, new themes, and better precision in editing. Amazing. I'll stick with Final Cut Studio, however.

GarageBand seems determined to make musicians out of us. Now you don't just have a multitrack recording studio for the masses, you have music lessons. First come basic lessons, teaching you the fundamentals (in HD video, no less). Then comes the cool part: Artist lessons. Who better to teach you how to play "Roxanne" than Sting? I just watched a preview of John Fogerty showing how to play "Proud Mary." And not all the instructors are ancient like me. There's some guy from Fall Out Boy teaching a song, And others my living-in-the-past brain has never heard of. There's also a very cool looking guitar amp simulator for those of you who do direct inject.

iWeb also has some new features, now with built-in FTP, automatically updating widgets, and Facebook notifications.

There's no update to iDVD.

So much for iLife. Now on to iWork.

For Pages '09, we now have a full-screen view that makes it feel like your working on paper on a black desk. Its aim is to kill all the distractions from elsewhere on the screen. There's now an outlining tool, a very popular way for structuring documents. Pages can now do mail-merge with Numbers, so that you can build mailing lists or create other customized documents. There are now over 180 templates to choose from. Its also compatible with MathType and Endnote, two popular tools in research papers and journals. Apple is also launching iWork.com, now in beta; that will allow both Windows and Mac users to see your beautiful documents just the way you intended. And it can provide your invited people with iWork, Microsoft Office, or PDF formats...whatever they need.

As I've never used spreadsheets for anything more complicated than lists, I'm not going to try to explain what's new in Numbers '09. Just follow that link (you know, the one right before this sentence), and see what Apple has to say.

Keynote has a few new transition tricks, animations in the creation of charts, and a new way to control your presentation: Keynote Remote, running on your iPhone or iPod Touch. That, by the way, is the first of only two mentions of the iPhone or iPod Touch in today's keynote address.

Lastly, some news in the iTunes Store. It looks like Steve Jobs finally gave in to the record companies; prices are changing. Starting in April, songs will still be 99¢, some will be $1.29, but some will be 69¢. We're told many more will be 69¢ than the high price. That's what the record companies wanted. What does Steve get? Now all four major labels are making DRM-free music available, at twice the quality of the original iTunes tracks. That's right, iTunes Plus is now standard. Also, music can now be purchased on iPhones via a 3G network. Previously, you had to be connected via Wi-Fi.

With the addition of 3 major labels to the iTunes Plus side, there's one frustrating things. iTunes has a one-click option to upgrade your entire library of previously purchased songs to the higher quality ones, for 30¢ a track. With this sudden upgrade, that would now cost me about $430. Unfortunately, that's the ONLY way to upgrade the tracks. Apple ought to rethink that now.

One other frustrating thing: by not going to San Francisco for the keynote, I didn't get to hear the great Tony Bennett close the event with a live performance. Damn.

Well, that's it. I've been up too late once again. Ciao!