Apple - QuickTime - Macworld San Francisco 2005 Expo Keynote

I tried to watch the keynote tonight, but QuickTime, as a streaming media, is just terrible. I've got good pipes into the house, but QT clearly doesn't handle loads appropriately. It took a LONG time to connect, and never rebuffered. But audio kept dropping out, video lost sync, all on a decent G4 machine. BOO!!!

Anyways, BIG news in Apple land. Picking up on the millions of iPods sold over the holiday season, I think they are in a really good position to finally increase their market share. The Mac mini is just brilliant. Just a few percentage points would mean a lot to the bottom line too. Can't wait to see the stock tomorrow!

And a $99 iPod? Whoo baby, better get 'em now before they sell out for xmas. Let's just say this thing will literally be flying off the shelves.

I'm not so impressed with iLife and iWork. How many people don't use spreadsheets? Well, you won't with Apple, because AppleWorks is still around, still sucks. No new spreadsheet in iWork. So you won't be working too hard. I'm also not sure why iWork's Pages app doesn't seem to be touting any web page building functionality.

Oh wait, I know why! They don't want to piss off Microsoft or Macromedia. Although they should piss off Macromedia. Those turkeys still have yet to put Flash player on a Palm, and still don't have Flash optimized for OS X. Losers.

Anyway, there's some other stuff. iLife '05. Yeah, this was inevitable. I'm not sure why, but the educational price is quite a bit steeper. Like a 200% increase. Why? Another nonplus event: "Magic Movie Editing." Oooooh, they finally put in a feature that Microsoft has had in their Movie Maker app for some time now. Cupertino, start your copiers, heh.

But this Mac mini thing has me excited. For $1002 you get:
a 1.4 GHz G4 CPU,
80 GB drive,
DVD burner,
512 MB RAM,
802.11g,
Bluetooth,
and a wireless keyboard and mouse.

With my educational discount it's just under a grand. Pretty. Frickin' Sweet.

Now I'm going to go create a how-to describing how you can turn the thing into a Media Center PC to rival Microsoft's piece of crap...
- posted by Victor Agreda, Jr. @ 6:12 PM