A Whole Slew of Apple Announcements
- January 11, 2005
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Apple has done it again with a whole slew of cool Mac announcements. None of them are a real surprise since it was already leaked what was going to happen. Nevertheless, they are all interesting announcements, especially the Mac mini.
Everyone knew this was coming, but it’s still cool to see it finally arrive. I have a close friend who is very interested in buying one of these so he can get his feet wet with the Mac. He’s been wanting to try a Mac out for a long time now, but could never justify the price. When the rumors first started flying about a cheap Mac, he became very excited. Now that those rumors have turned out to be true, I guarantee he will buy one. So Apple has already gained a new user there, and who knows how many more they will gain with this entry-level Mac.
The specs on it are pretty good. Inside the elegant, 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch square anodized aluminum enclosure, the Mac mini houses a 1.25 or 1.42GHz G4 processor, 40 or 80GB hard drive, a slot-loading CD-R/DVD-ROM optical drive, 256MB DDR SDRAM and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM. Not too shabby for less than $500. You can plug in your existing keyboard, mouse and monitor and you’re good to go with a new Mac OS X system. If I was an unsatisfied Windoze user (*gasp* those exist?!), the Mac mini would be very attractive.
Another major announcement is the iPod shuffle. This is the new, low-end MP3 player that was also expected to be released. It starts at a low $99 and can hold up to 240 songs. It’s about the size of a pack of gum, and sports the same white skin as its bigger brother, the iPod. If I was just looking for a cheap, good looking MP3 player and didn’t need the larger capacity hard drive for making backups, the iPod shuffle would definitely be attractive. I’m sure the iPod shuffle will be a hit.
The third announcement was the release of the new iLife 2005, with upgraded versions of iTunes, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD and Garageband. The package sports a new box design and a truckload of new features for the packaged applications. And you get it all for $79.
Alongside iLife, Apple also released iWork. This is a new bundle that includes the new Keynote 2 as well as a brand new app called Pages. Pages looks like a nice little wordprocessor that takes advantage of all the latest OS X goodies. I’m not sure if Apple plans on eventually taking Mac users off of Office or not, but this is definitely a cheaper alternative to buying Microsoft Office or even Microsoft Word by itself.
There’s an already existing Mac application called iWork, which I use. It’s a project management application that’s quite nice. I’m not sure if Apple bought the rights to the name or what, but we’ll see what the original iWork does in a little bit I’m sure.
So a lot of interesting announcements today from Apple. I’m curious to see how well the new stuff sells.
Well, it looks like IGG Software has renamed their application to iBiz. I guess Apple bought the name off of him. Lucky stiff.
Another update? Yes! Make sure to check out the new OS X Tiger Tour Apple has put up. It looks amazing!