Back to the Mac

/ hsoi

Yesterday, Apple held an event to get “Back to the Mac”. You can watch the replay of the keynote here.

My impressions.

First, it’s evident from the growth of the product sales, the revenue, the units shipped… anyone that continues to say Apple is some niche just isn’t paying attention.

iLife ’11? I like it. You can tell this is a mature product suite. It’s not adding major new features but rather refining what it has to a high degree. It’s lots of little touches, little things to help make life easier. For instance, that your Flickr and Facebook albums are just a part of the iPhoto library so you have the same editing interface? Awesome! I’m considering buying iLife just for that, as I know Wife would appreciate it. I got a major kick out of the “trailers” feature in iMovie. They did a great job at making movie editing “for the rest of us”.

Lion. Mission Control makes sense because yes, they had all these things that were disconnected so it’s time to bring them all together. I’m not sure about LaunchPad, how really necessary it is, but I think it’s something I’d have to play with. I can see for less savvy users that it could be just the thing they need.

Of course, the big thing for me to watch is the App Store. This is a possible game-changer for Mac developers. You can read the store review guidelines here, but it’s behind an ADC login so I’m not sure how publicly I can discuss it. What I will say are the impressions and questions that came to mind when I was watching the keynote:

  • Apple controls the end-to-end experience, so I assume this means you can’t use your own registration/license scheme, nor your own installer (and probably have to create your install in a particular way). That makes sense, but it’s a bit of a pain for developers since now we’ll have two means by which our apps could be installed, two code paths, two different builds, two different things to have to support and test… it’s just more work on our end, but it stands to reason for the mechanism.
  • I figure this will benefit small developers, but how about big boys? For instance, will Microsoft sell Office? Will Adobe sell Photoshop?
  • Will we start to see competing app stores? It’s well-possible for them to exist, but then what sort of additional headache and nightmare will it be for developers?  Could we see the end of traditional sales channels?
  • What about non-applications? Like plug-ins?
  • The concern is, Apple’s store will become THE face of how you buy Mac software, thus if you don’t comply with them, you’re out of luck and will suffer. I’m concerned about Apple’s content restrictions, technical restrictions (e.g. non-app sales?), and so on.

But really, all we saw of Lion were some basic things. I’ll be more curious to hear about things at the developer-level, which I reckon will come with WWDC 2011.

Finally… there’s one more thing.

The new MacBook Air’s.

Impressive. That’s all I can say. Sure they are not uber-powerful (slower processor) and decked out (e.g. only 2 GB RAM) when compared to the traditional MacBook and MacBook Pro, but my word what they do offer. The small size, the light weight. You do get an amazing amount of stuff in a very small package. If I travelled often on business, lots of coach class flights, and had to get lots of work done on the road? I could see picking up one of the 11″ models to help me handle email and work on the road.

And at that price point and form factor? Gosh… if I had a few thou lying around, I’d pick up 3, one for each of my kids. Don’t have the money, but it was just that compelling. Granted, your basic MacBook gives you more for less money, but the Air is so cutting edge that yes… it tantalizes me. 🙂

The main point tho is to see Apple well.. getting back to Mac. Mac has always been Apple’s bread and butter, but for the past few years it’s been about iPod/iPhone/iPad, which I totally don’t blame them for. For me personally, I make my living making Mac OS X software, not iOS software, so at times I felt ignored. It wasn’t true, Apple has been continuing to update the OS and Mac, but it just hasn’t been the forefront… I skipped the past couple WWDC’s because they were all iOS focused. But the irony is my life is now shifting away from Mac, just as Apple is shifting back to it. It’s like fashion from the 80’s… retro is cool again, and so is Mac. 🙂

2 thoughts on “Back to the Mac”

    • They’re taking a bigger chunk.

      But in exchange you’re getting the experience, the ability to be right in front of users. You’re getting a lot for your money, so to speak. The question remains tho, is it worth it?

      For my day job…. well, that’s a question they’ll have to answer. For me as a small-time developer (my LLC)? It’s worth it because it will help people find me more easily (in theory).

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