Skip to main content

Back to Mac, my impressions

10/21/2010 - mac, keynote
New UI stuff in Mac OS X 10.7, more iPad/iOS-like functionality - for better and worse. It seems the mac has had a perfectly viable place to put your easy to get to apps in - why Launchpad? New ways to handle full-screen apps are nice I suppose. But way too little information - and release next summer seems awfully far away. Any news to Mail? iCal? Finder? Seems the news was only UI "fluff". Also - "mission control" was a pretty lame name.
iLife 11 is sweet - not a mention of either iDVD (understandable) or iWeb - and the homepage specifically says they are version 09, so... that may account for the smaller pricetag I suppose. Are iWeb and iDVD on the way out completely? I ordered it directly, and though I've moved to Aperture and don't play (enough) music, the new iMove is worth the pricetag alone. Movie trailers seemed awesome.
The new Macbook Air is awesome though. Smaller, leaner, cheeper and better battery life. I may just get this one. I have no need for a large Macbook Pro anymore.
But hey! A 11" Macbook Air? Wait, what? That's now officially a *netbook* which Apple critized heavily not six months ago. Shorter battery life, slower CPU. While not dustbin-low specs as many wintel netbooks, that's clearly still a netbook.
Facetime for OSX (not Windows!?) beta. Facetime is still a stupid thing entirely as far as I'm concerned. But it was seemless to download, install and hook up a facetime call with a iPhone owner. Really slick. But Why. The. Fuck. Not. Via. iChat? A new app? Really? Sigh.
App Store for apps - I've said it many times. It's the obvious idea and the only question is why it took so long. I just hope it supports trial periods, beta versions and stuff like that. Plus - with Apple taking 30% of the revenue, chances are that app prices may actually be higher through the store since sideloading is still an option. I'm assuming that 30% of the app isn't distribution, so the only reason for developers to go Mac AppStore is for exposure, ratings and such.
I was most amazed by the Macbook Air, and I look forward to OSX Lion in spite of the sparse information found in the Keynote.