The Macworld Keynote – Not that bad after all.

Like every year since Apple abandoned live streams of the Macworld Keynote, I, like many others have followed the apple event through the various live blogs. And like many others this year, I found the results a little underwhelming. In the post Phil-note lack of euphoria, I posted about some of the announcements with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. I wasn’t even going to watch the keynote, but for some reason I did anyway, and now I’m glad. The announcements may not be earth shattering but having watched the presentation I’m beginning to think that it wasn’t actually that bad. In fact there was some pretty good stuff in there. It just goes to show – you should never blog in an emotional state, be that anger or just ambivalence. Anyway, like I said, there were a couple of things that really impressed me.

The first was the iPhoto stuff. Faces and places doesn’t sound that exciting when you just see it as a series of typed updates, but when you see someone give a demo of the technology it’s pretty damn impressive. I also found it interesting the way Phil went into detail on some of the things, like the way you can hold the option key while scrubbing through people in faces, or pressing the space bar to set the snapshot photo. I don’t think Steve would have done this. You may argue that Phil isn’t the showman that Steve is but he made it his own, and he did a good job. You have to respect that. You also have to be impressed the way that faces works. It’s a pretty impressive technology. It seemed to work really fast too. I don’t know if that was the clever loading of images into the demo, or if it really works that fast, but over all it seemed really responsive. I think the fact that it’s leopard only could be a hint. There was lots of evidence of core animation being heavily used through out the Apps and this is good too see.

The way they implemented faces too was pretty slick. It was a typical example of Apple taking a problem looking for a solution and solving it in a clever way. Geo-tagging and GPS equipped cameras have been around for a while but no one has really come up with a good way to work with this data until now. It looks like a real winner. I hope they roll some of this into Aperture in the next (badly needed) upgrade.

Of all the iLife demos though the iMovie impressed me the most. When the even was live I didn’t pay that much attention, as I never really use iMovie, being a heavy final cut user. Having watched it though I’m really impressed. It’s not the new precision editing interface that is the real innovation or even the stabilisation (this is basically smoothcam from Shake and Final Cut Pro). No, what really impressed me was the amount of things that were working in real time. Final Cut can’t hold a candle to iMovie 09 on this front. I mean, it’s really really impressive. If you haven’t watched the keynote, you have to check it out. It’s very good and, we finally get to see the mysterious engineer mentioned by Steve in last year’s keynote. (Who sounds and looks like Aaron Eckhart – as opposed to some pale skinned dweeb who’s been in a basement for 5 years and never gets to talk to real people. What’s that about ?)

Some of the iWork stuff was pretty cool too, although I don’t quite know what to make of iWork.com. It kind of seems pointless as it is, but I suspect that after the fiasco that was the mobile me launch they are going to start slow and build on it. One of the things that I did really like is the full screen mode in Pages. In fact, I’m using the trial version right now to write this. It seems a solid upgrade overall though and anything that means that you don’t have to use the slow painful rabid dog that is Microsoft Office is good news in my book.

Then there’s the battery. Oh, the battery. Apple, I have to admit a little secret. Well, it’s not actually much of a secret, but when I first heard the rumour of this, and even after you announced it I couldn’t help but think: “are you out of your fricken minds?”. But you know what, you have to give them kudos for doing what they did. This is the second time in the last year that Apple has moved beyond its typical sphere of operation and took on something from a raw engineering, science level perspective. First with coming up with a new manufacturing process, and now coming up with a whole new type of battery, not just the shell, but the whole thing, right from the chemistry to the electrodes. It’s all very impressive stuff, and I think represents a new maturity and a new playing field for cupertino.

In the end I suspect the jury will be out about the non-removable aspect of the battery until it’s been out there in the world for a while. On paper, it sounds impressive, but those specs rarely transfer into a real world reality. I don’t think the issue is really battery life mind you, because in most situations where pros would be using it for long periods of time, they would more than likely have access to a power supply. For me, the issue is longevity. Apple claims their new technology will allow the battery to last for 5 years. This sounds terribly optimistic to me. I’ve had my current laptop for about 16 months and it’s already past 300 cycles and the capacity is half what it used to be. I’m not that heavy a user, so that would put me at 1000 cycles, the claimed life-span of the new battery in a little over 4 years. Replacing it wouldn’t be so much of an issue if I was near an Apple store, but here in Ireland, there aren’t any, and I really don’t like the idea of having to send it away just to get the battery swapped out. Still, time will tell I guess. The problem with these life-span calculations, is that they’re based on statistics and lab experiments and it’s not possible to tell for sure until the technology is out there in the real world in everyday use, so I guess we won’t know for sure for quite a while.

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