This week is a very special week, where San Francisco plays host to MacWorld 2009. Not only is it a conference full of fun for any Mac nerd, but it is also the time of year when Apple announces new product releases. This year, they've made three announcements thus far - some dull and expected, and other shocking and exciting.
First, with the expected announcements: iLife 09 and iWork 09.
iLife 09 starts shipping in late January, and includes new versions of iPhoto and GarageBand.
iPhoto actually has some cool new features, like Faces and Places. With faces, you can use facial recognition to tag the people in your photos, and iPhoto will (attmpt to) recognize that person in other photos, and then tag them for you. Pretty handy if you ask me. Although, really, is it going to recognize Judy if she has on that Catwoman mask?
The other interesting new feature in iPhoto is called Places, where you can basically geotag your images using a map. Kind of spiffy.
There are other new features as well, including integration with Facebook and Flickr, but we'll have to wait for additional details to emerge before we get too excited about this one.
GarageBand has a new feature as well, artist lessons. This doesn't appeal to me all that much as I'm not musically talented (at all), but it seems kind of cool. Artists like Norah Jones have teamed up with Apple to offer musical lessons for $4.99 each. The video lessons includes tips and basic information from the artists themselves. Apparently, GarageBand includes the "basic" lessons, but no word on what Apple qualifies as "basic".
iWork 09 was also announced - big surprise there. There are some improved features with the applications, but nothing I'd really want to write home about.
The Keynote update includes an iPhone application that can be used as a remote, which shows the slides as you are displaying them on the screen. Handy, but not exactly an earth shaker.
Apple also announced some new Numbers features, which are promising, but rather dull in comparison to iWork.com.
Apple has decided to compete with Google by releasing iWork.com. iWork.com is basically like Google Docs, but with some features I think Google Docs has been lagging on - namely the abilities to add comments and notes to documents.
Bad news about iWork.com? It will be free during beta, but after it comes out of beta, it will be a paid feature. Hasn't Apple learned that sometimes giving your customers a free cookie will endear them to you? Hello, the free iPods during the Back to School Sale!
The third and final announcement is the new 17" MacBook Pro. It's the thinnest and lightest 17" notebook available - which, really, is not that hard considering that most of them are bricks.
The new 17" MacBook Pro has a matte display, with a $50 upgrade option for an anti-glare screen. It has the new glass touchpad that comes with the new MacBooks, and all the standard ports associated with the Pro line. There are some other fancy upgrades to the tech, but let's get to the battery.
The battery is not removable. But get this: it holds an impressive 8 hour charge, and has 1,000 charge cycles. Which, I guess, bonus that you won't be filling up landfills with dead batteries, but what happens when it finally dies? Apple has an "exchange program" but didn't go into any details.
The laptop will start shipping at the end of January for $2799 in one configuration: 2.66GHz, 4GB RAM, 320GB hard drive.