I’ve just perused the announcements of the new Apple gear that Steve Jobs must’ve announced this morning at MacWorld (why did they decide not to broadcast the session?).
The coolest new thing in my view is the Mac Mini – a G4 Mac that’s 6.5 inches square and 2 inches high for $500 – wow! (no keyboard or monitor included). I think this will sell a whole bunch for personal media servers, low cost web servers, etc.
The iPod Shuffle is a flash-memory based iPod with 512 MB or 1 GB of capacity. It’s got features that many people may like that grab random tunes from iTunes playlists and play them in random order. The feature that I really like is that it plugs right into a USB port.
iWork is the bundling of the new version of Keynote with a new word processor called Pages. These might be useful for lots of folks. I’m still astounded that Keynote doesn’t export html files, though the new version exports QuickTime and Flash in addition to PDF. I’m sticking with BBEdit and Eric Meyer’s S5 web standards presentation software.
There’s also new versions of the iLife programs (iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iDVD, and iMovie) and of Final Cut Express.
