So the Macworld keynote was lame. Phil Schiller is boring to watch, not just because his announcements were boring, but also because he lacks the same enthusiasm and RDF of Jobs. There’s just something very blah blah about Schiller’s intonation.
As for the stuff that was announced.
iPhoto, kind of interesting. Face recognition I would definitely want, but I don’t use iPhoto, and even if I bought a Mac, I’d still stick with lightroom, and so unless there’s some magic bridging between the two libraries, I don’t think it’s going to be useful. Hopefully Adobe will someday integrate the feature into LR.. or it can become a standard EXIF standard so you can have a face-recognition app go and tag all your photos and then browse that information from a standard EXIF-compliant library manager.
iMovie looks slick too. My main interest in getting a Mac at this point would be for iMovie. It looks a lot better than most of the consumer-level video editing software available for Windows (Pinnacle, Ulead, Premiere Elements), but I’ll get to more of that later.
iWork.com, looks lame. Collaborative editing is the holy grail, and they’ve done nothing to address that. Google docs is still far more interesting to me.
17 inch MBP. The whole battery debate I don’t care about. I rarely replace a battery, and if it can really get 1000 cycles, then I’m sure this thing will last as long as I care to use it. Having an 8hr charge is much more important than being replaceable.
My other concern was that it appears to have a wide-gamut screen. That means things are going to suck when you plug in an external monitor that is not also wide-gamut. Sure OSX has good color management, but I think even OSX apps tend to fall over when there are multiple monitors with different color profiles.
My conspiracy theory is that they’re going to do something to address this in Snow Leopard. Without it, even the standard Mac UI is going to look like something from hilighter city.
As for video editing, the one Windows software I didn’t list above Sony Vegas Movie Studio. I started playing with version 9 in a VM, and it is suprisingly good. The engine is solid, and most importantly it is FAST. Fast enough where it feels like all interactions are really real time, and you can spend a lot of time tweaking and experimenting without having long delays between for each operation. It’s probably good enough for me to stave off getting a Mac (since the only real reason to get a Mac right now is iMovie), and I can see how the whole Win7 vs Snow Leopard thing works out. Plus there’s a good upgrade path to the full Vegas suite in case I ever wanted to do that. The only concern is that Vegas Movie Studio 9 apparently doesn’t officially support Vista x64. There are a few reports claiming that it runs fine, but that’s still a little annoying.