Back To The Mac

Earlier today, Apple introduced a host of new products under the umbrella title "Back to the Mac". iLife 11, available today, was demoed and described and it looks like an excellent upgrade from iLife 09, especially considering the generous pricing of just $49. Big features include increased social integration in iPhoto, Movie Trailers in iMovie and a feature in GarageBand that provides you with piano and guitar lessons.

A powerful beginning to a characteristically classy performance from Jobs, but one that was easily overshadowed by later developments. The charismatic CEO moved on to announce a piece of software that inevitably had to be coming - FaceTime for the Mac. I have always said that FaceTime, an interesting but admittedly limited feature when it was first announced for the iPhone 4, needed to be expanded. After all, what's the point of only being able to video call the few people you know who actually also have an iPhone 4. Jobs hinted that expansion was coming when he described it as a 'Open Standard' during his WWDC keynote back in the summer, but it has yet to be adopted by Android or Windows. Since then, it has been added to the iPod Touch and, today, the Mac. It seems certain to be headed to the iPad in its next iteration as well. Once FaceTime is on all of these devices, Apple hopes that companies making competing devices will adopt the technology too, meaning that the range of people available for you to place a call with will be greatly expanded.

As you may or may not have guessed by the wonderfully orange-tinted picture of the roaring lion to your left, the next Apple announcement was a 'sneak peek' of a future version if Mac OS X. Big-cat-themed operating system names are commonplace now in the Mac community, and Mac OS 10.7 is no exception, adopting the name "Lion". This lends itself quite well to the theory that we are reaching the end of OS X's lifespan - after all, how do you top Lion? Mountain Lion? I think not.

Steve talked about how iOS was born from Mac OS X and illustrated the circular movement of innovation with his usual elegance, showing how ideas from Mac OS X were useful in developing iOS, and how features from iOS will inevitably be equally useful in future versions of Mac OS X. With this cumbersome mantra imprinted onto your consciousness, try to envision some of the new features making their debut in OS X Lion. Yup, that's right. Multitouch. Nope, not on the screen, apparently "touch wants to be horizontal, not vertical". So we're stuck with trackpads and Magic Mice for now. Yep, they have actually added "Launch Pad" - basically the Mac equivalent of your iOS home screen that shows all your applications. And yes, there is finally, FINALLY, FINALLYa Mac App Store. The tagline? "Fart apps coming to a Mac near you." Like it? I thought so.

On a more serious note, what does this actually mean? Well it means that Apple is trying to make even more money - they want developers to produce apps for your Mac and sell them through a channel that they regulate, they control, and they receive 30% of all sales from. It also means that you will probably have a whole lot more apps on your Mac now that there is actually somewhere to get them from. But more importantly, it means that Apple is making a move towards closing the Mac platform just like they have closed the iOS platform. They want you buying your Applications from them, not anyone else. Is that a good thing? It depends on your philosophy and whether you actually care. What is a good thing, is seamless integration - App Store apps will automatically download in the background, update, and 'just work' as the saying goes.

Lion looks intriguing to say the least, but the exposure we were given to it today was minimal to say the least, and more information will surely be coming sometime soon. To anyone watching the live stream not familiar to Mr. Jobs' mannerisms and speech structure, it would have seemed very logical for him to finish the product announcements there. But, as ever, there was one more thing.



Heavily rumoured in the days and weeks leading up to the presentation, Steve announced two new Macbook Airs based on an entirely new, streamlined 'ultra-portable' design. Last updated in June 2009, the Macbook Air seemed due for a refresh, and boy what a refresh it got. Described by Apple CEO Steve Jobs as what would happen if "a Macbook and an iPad hooked up", the new Macbook Air weighs in at just 2.6lbs for the 13.3 inch version and just 2.3lbs for the 11.6 inch version. That's less than half a gallon of milk. The laptop tapers down from just 0.68 inches thick to an incredible 0.11 inches thick. The low end model costs just $999 - remember that the original Macbook Air cost $1799 when it first came out, and comes equipped with an 11.6 inch screen, 2GB of RAM, a 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor. The biggie? Only 64GB of flash storage. Why flash? Well, because it's smaller, more power efficient, twice as fast and far more high technology than a hard drive. Unfortunately, GB for GB, its also far more expensive. After all, a Macbook costing the very same $999 has a 2.4GHz processor and a whopping 250GB hard drive. The Macbook is also twice as heavy. The MacBook Airs boast 5 and 7 hour battery lives, increasing with screen size, and 30 days of standby battery life - another feature influenced by the iPad.

The high end Macbook Air costs $1599 and the extra dough will upgrade your machine to a 13.3 inch screen, 256GB of flash memory, and a 2.13GHz Core 2 Duo Processor. For $100 less, you could nab a MacBook Pro with a 2.66GHz processor, double the RAM and 320GB of hard drive storage. But the Macbook Pro weighs nearly 3 times as much.

If you want far more power, and far more hard drive space for the same price in your next laptop, the new Macbook Air is most definitely not for you. But if you simply must have the latest gadget, or just desperately need the huge boost in portability and slim form factor, it may be worthwhile to consider it. Can the Macbook Air justify its price tag because of its portability? It depends on your needs.