At today's Mac event, Commandant Jobs unveiled some fairly lackluster updates.
Something about iPhoto. I don't really care since I happily use picasa and flickr. And if I were to pay for something to edit my photos, I would save up until I could afford to get Aperture.
Something about Garage Band, which, again, is boring as I don't play music. I don't even play Rock Band for that matter.
But there were a couple of hopeful glimmers.
Jobs dropped the bomb that they were working on their next OS system: Lion. The biggest advances seem to be aimed at bringing the functionality of an iPad back to the Mac. this means they want to be able to run full-screen apps and have multi-touch control for the macs. If they can incorporate this multitouch into the next generation of Macbook Pros with the Liquidmetal design, the proposed cooling patents and somehow keep the machine from becoming sentient and trying to destroy mankind, it should be a pretty solid machine. But it kind of seems that Jobs has painted himself into a corner with the name of the system. Lion? The king of the jungle? What will they call the next OS afterwards? Sabretooth? Tabby? Or will there be a shift to a new animal-avatar? "Presenting Mac OSX...Koala."
Steve also managed to sneak in his characteristic "Once last thing..." before closing out the hour-and-a-half long schpiel. A newly redesigned Macbook Air. What really caught my attention about these updated models was the complete abandonment of a hard-drive. As of late I have been warming up to Solid-state Drives as the future of storage on computers. They're faster, quieter, cooler, smaller and less prone to mechanical problems than regular disc-based hard-drives. The new Airs instead use flash memory as storage. Consequently they are only able to hold between 64 Gb and 256GB. In a world where Terrabyte storage is becoming more common place and the Petabyte is looming ever closer, this amount of storage is paltry at best. And also, it might just be my own personal experience with the program Flash, but the name itself brings to mind negative connotations. Time will tell if this system will be preferred over regular hardware found in the grown-up version of laptops, or if this was merely the bastard son of a drunken tryst between a Macbook and an iPad.
Overall, it was another bland entry of a Mac Event. I guess I'm just jaded against anything that isn't a mind-blowing hardware revelation. Guess I'll just have to wait until the next generation of workhorse.
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