Gruber is unfortunately made to eat his words on the whole ‘flash–memory–based’ debate with the now–confirmed iPod mini. I was considering entering the debate a couple of days ago with the previously–unmentioned thought of “iPods already use flash memory as a playback buffer so the hard drive isn’t always spinning. Surely eliminating the hard drive and expanding that flash drive wouldn’t be so terrible and/or costly, and it’d greatly reduce battery use t’boot”. But hey: I was still kinda unsure if there would even be a miniPod. As it turns out, despite Jobs’ zeal in aiming for “the high–end flash market”, the iPod mini is indeed hard–drive based. It’s right there in the tech specs. So yeah, now I look like an ass.- Everybody’s saying it: but $249 is a patently ridiculous price for a 4GB iPod… I don’t care how small it is.
- Good to see G5 XServes and upgraded XServe RAIDs… I think we’ll all be interested to see a few more G5 supercomputers in the future, now with an XServe G5 at the same price as a comparable desktop G5, and a helluva lot easier to rack mount.
- iPhoto (at long last) got the upgrade it needs to remain competitive. It’s been way too slow for way too long, and I’m glad to see it move forward. We finally got those smart albums we’ve all wanted, a choice of more than one song on loop during slide shows, and rendezvous sharing. I’m stoked… and this is a freakin’ photo–organizing app we’re talking about; being stoked isn’t what you’d call a normal reaction in these circumstances.
- Why in the hell did iPhoto skip a version number? Is iPhoto 4 the successor to iPhoto 2 just so it doesn’t look immature alongside iTunes 4.2, iMovie 4, iDVD 4, and GarageBand 1?
- iMovie’s update is nice–looking, but not jaw–dropping.
- iTunes really didn’t change at all… but thanks to everyone at Apple for making it sound like it did.
- iDVD’s “build and archive” looks particularly promising to me; someone who has no intention of buying a Mac with a SuperDrive right now, but will have access to university Macs with SuperDrives all the same.
- GarageBand looks pants–wettingly great. If I had that app at thirteen years of age, I’d probably be a much better bassist than I am right now. That, and my bands’ home–recorded tracks would’ve sounded a lot better. Come to think of it, if I had a Mac at thirteen years of age I’d be a totally different person… not that the Mac would’ve been running OS X anyway, so I guess this whole exercise is intellectually bankrupt.
- Aside from mentioning that iLife ‘04 is $49 USD, nothing is said regarding Apple’s download policy. When iLife was first released, all apps remained free downloads except for iDVD. I’d like to hope that that will still hold true (though I wouldn’t expect GarageBand to be a free download), because frankly I want to download iPhoto 4 and iMovie 4 right now.
- What in the sweet name of fuck is with GarageBand’s user interface? Black, with wood trim? Black, with wood trim? I believe this is what we call ‘blind emulation of real–world interfaces’, something QuickTime was once infamous for. Hell, I’d take brushed metal over that.
Posted by Chris Clark on January 7, 2004 at 3:04 AM