Apple Macworld 2009: What's new? The Mac lite!

As expected, the guru of the cult, Steve Jobs, stepped aside and in his place we had Phil Schiller. For the first few minutes Phil keeps it soft, talking about new versions of iLife, iWork, iMovie and GarageBand, all now 09 branded.


Social networking to the fore

iPhoto, the photo management system, will now include face detection and geotagging, really no more than a catch-up with the functionality already on most recent mobiles: sending photos to your Flickr account and simultaneously letting your friends know where they were taken (to cite the example given by Phil Schiller). In terms of face detection it does basically what Facebook does. If you’re not yet on this social network, you’ll learn this: you can tag friends who appear in photos and name them on the image, so that everyone knows who was at Paul and Jessica’s wedding for example.

Back to Phil (after boring us with his pretty pictures for a good long while): "I hope you're as excited about this as I am." Sure thing Phil! Next please!

Now on to iMovie and GarageBand

iMovie sees the introduction of automatic image stabilisation. On the music and audio side, GarageBand will now offer, amongst other stuff, individual “artist lessons” with well know musicians. Sign up for a video lesson with Sting for just $4.99!

The presentation continues… but there’s a certain lack of enthusiasm in this keynote. Almost as if we were missing a little something, or perhaps someone!

What we expected I suppose… or nearly. Let’s skip the rest of it. Will there be a “One more thing!”? Wait for it!

7:35 pm: We’ve come to the end, finally, but man!

This should throw a bit of cold water on even the most fervent members of the sect. It is though in step with Apple’s announcement that this would be its last time in attendance at Macworld.

For a final appearance, this was kind’ve forced. They did the minimum. At least they were there!

Just about ...

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