My take on Macworld 2006
Most of the tech sites are doing it so I might as well. It’s been several days since Steve did his one man show at the Moscone. I’ve had mixed feelings ever since as a Mac fanatic (hmm, fanatic is too strong a word. Let’s just say I’m a satisfied end-user).
You see, there’s something going on in the .com world and I have a feeling Apple knows it. You see, Jobs barely talked about hardware that afternoon.
Patching up .Mac
I predict in the next two years, all Mac users will be .Mac subscribers not because the services are all that great but because at .Mac will play an integral part in all the Apple iApps. This is the first observation I made – that Apple is patching holes and reinforcing the service infrastructure rather than innovating new products.
The new release of iLife ’06 and iWork ’06 brings home the statement that there’s nothing new for the first part of the year from Apple – new themes here, new editing tools there, but nothing innovative. What a shift. A move like this makes a lot of sense in the long run, albeit it downplays the magic of Apple Keynote addresses.
The Intel hype is here
The Intel-powered MacBook was no secret. It hasn’t been for the better part of 2005. And the migration of Apple to Intel-based machines from the IBM PowerPC was not a move brought about by innovation, but by necessity if Apple is indeed convinced to stay in the IT race for the next several years.
The arrival of the MacBook is but a sampler of things to come – and I predict it won’t be from the hardware side, but from software, once again. The MacBook and the new Intel powered iMac are mediums that will run more powerful iApplications – Aperture is one of them. Have you ever tried running Aperture on a G4? You must be crazy.
Overtaken by open source?
The reality of the Internet is that the top players now aren’t exactly the big guns when it comes to services. The top players are in fact the small, independent developers who are lean enough to bend with the forever shifting winds of the Internet. Open source and independent application and service providers are the new speedboats of the Internet. To name a few, you have Writely (writely.com) for online document editing, Shutterbook (shutterbook.com) for free mass online photo storage,
Why get a .Mac account to blog and share photos when you can do this with third party applications like WordPress and Shutterbook? Well, it depends how you look at it. A long time ago, the Apple logo was a radar for rebel computing mavens – Think Different, they said. But the past few months has shifted the rebels’ choice into a phenomenon known as open source characterized by free, fast, and quality services. Apple sees this, and wants its bases covered.
This piece forms part of a column I write titled The Prodigal Screen Protector and Other Bedtime Stories.
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