NVinNYC

Okay so I haven’t really commented on MacWorld yet so here’s my 12¢ (2¢ per product announcement).

1. iPod Shuffle: Who needs a screen? I don’t most of the time. For $99 for 512 MB or $149 for a 1 GB model, who can argue? I heard the battery life is awesome too, Mosberg reported 15+ hours on his. Doesn’t that beat AAA any day? These things are going to sell like mad; we had about forty 512s at the store today and they were gone in about 2 hours. People were seriously like, “Hmm, you have them… Okay give me 2!” According to Steve, I’m getting a Gig one for free, “Hell yeah!”
2. Mac Mini: Again, at that price point (base $499), who can argue? Hell it even includes the new iLife. Were gonna sell a million of these too. They really are that damn small (imagine a stack of about 4 CD jewel cases). What remains to see is how fast it is, I’m looking forward to benchmarks, not that those will matter much to the target audience.
3. iLife ’05: Great upgrades to the four core apps (iTunes doesn’t count since it’s free), still totally worth the extra thirty at $79. My two questions are: First, who the hell is going to use the HD features of iMovie? Second, where is Asteroid so people can easily use the 8 recording tracks of GarageBand.
4. iWork (’05): Though the new Keynote trumps PowerPoint I don’t really see Pages giving Word much competition since it’s not nearly as robust. I’m planning to use Pages to edit and layout the pictures/tables/charts in my papers after I write them in Word (since Word does these things with about the grace of a linebacker). I have to play with them more before I can really judge them though. I will say moving from charging $99 for the original Keynote to $79 for the whole iWork package is a refreshing price drop which should help get out more copies of Keynote (which seemed to be laging in sales recently).
5. Tiger: Not much new info really, mostly rehash from WWDC, and no ship date damn it! Steve did show the refined interface (which looks quite nice in Mail). Of note however, is the updated info, now at the top of the Mac OS X page, which (especially if you didn’t see the keynote and haven’t looked at Tiger before) is quite impressive.
6. Final Cut Express HD: This seems to be basically just as powerful as the Pro version used to be now that it has LiveType & Soundtrack included and support for 99 audio and video tracks. Plus HD editing that might see some good use. The ability to work with iMovie as well as Motion projects should also help those stepping up who don’t need the ridiculous power (and high cost) of the Pro version.

Overall it looks like another breakthrough year for Apple!