Apple hosted an event at their campus in Cupertino today to unveil some new features that will appear in the next Mac OS X release, called Lion. We already knew it by the artwork in the invite, but it turned out be better than expected.
First, Tim Cook talked about some Mac numbers – which most of us have already seen in their quarter results report yesterday. If you are curious, you may look at the report here.
Next, Steve Jobs and some other Apple folks walked through iLife ’11 and its new features. Starting with iPhoto, the new version is hugely improved when compared to iPhoto ’09. First, there’s a full screen mode that looks a lot like an iOS interface. If you own an iPad, you will find that very familiar. Slideshows are a lot better as well, with new templates and transitions, and photo books have hugely improved and are incredibly easy to make. But the greatest feature for me is the new Flickr/Facebook integration. You can now actually read your photostream from inside iPhoto, as well follow comments and recent activity on the sidebar. Very neat! E-mail integration looks great too. All features and screenshots here.
iMovie also received some great upgrades, mainly in the audio editing area, which, let’s be honest, was poor. Now it’s easier to edit audio streams, thankfully. There are also some new one-step events, like instant replays, new themes, movie trailer creation and a Faces-like people finder. I’m not really an iMovie heavy user, so I won’t comment much about it. You can find the details here.
GarageBand has improved too, with some ProTools-like magic, like Flex Time and Groove Matching. There are some new guitar amp simulations, like a Hiwatt stack, Fender Tweed, Marshall stack and an Orange stack. They are not as good as GuitarRig, but okay for an amateur app like this. The ordinary lessons are also still in there too. More details here.
No mention of iWeb today, so I guess it hasn’t changed significantly. I will find out in 4 weeks when I get my copy of iWork ’11 (it’s shipping in 2-3 weeks here in Brazil).
Next, they introduced FaceTime for Mac. There’s a beta version available today and it’s fully functional. I managed to call a friend in Amsterdam and it was flawless. Much better than Skype video! Since most of my friends have Macs, I will probably drop Skype for video calls and use only FaceTime from now on. I also tested calls to iPhone 4 (I actually called my own phone from the Mac) and it’s working well too. With dual camera stuff and all. You can download it here. The only issue I see is that we cannot add/modify e-mail addresses directly from the app, so better integration with Address Book is required.
Now, Mac OS X Lion. It’s clearly not ready yet, but Steve demonstrated a few features. There’s advanced support for multitouch gestures, which makes sense with the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad around. There is now a mode for apps to run full screen, like an iOS app; a new way of organizing apps, like in iOS, with same folder creation scheme and all called Launchpad; and a new way of navigating between windowed apps and full screen apps called Mission Control (what a dull name…), which looks like an improved Exposé to me. And the coolest feature of them all is the Mac App Store, which will launch in 90 days. That’s a huge announcement for Mac developers and will help a lot us users to find the apps we want, which are kinda scattered around the interweb today. Check the features here.
Finally, the cherry on the top of the cake: the new MacBook Air. That’s an awesome piece of engineering. Very compact electronics, big battery and extremely thin (3mm to 1.7mm height). Coming in two sizes: 11” and 13”, with LED-backlit display, Core 2 Duo processor, flash storage (no HDD option), no optical drive and a full-size touchpad similar to those found in the MacBook Pro. As Steve said, it’s a fusion of lessons learned from the iPad into the MacBook Pro. And the results are quite impressive. I was expecting a more powerful processor (like a Core i3) and upgradable RAM till 8GB (4GB is the limit), but nevertheless, looks like it’s a great notebook. All the info about it is available here.
I was planning to upgrade my 2-year old 13” aluminum MacBook (the first unibody) and this is a serious contender. I simulated a purchase at Apple Store today:
- 13” MacBook Pro, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD = $1999
- 13” MacBook Air, 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 256GB SSD = $1799
Due to Apple’s aggressive pricing for the MacBook Air, it’s a much better deal for people who want portability over performance. The entry-level model starts at only $999.
I don’t get the 11” model, though. It’s just too small for a notebook and you can’t get the bigger 256GB SSD. My guess is that’s an iPad for grumpy people. You know, the guys who don’t get the purpose of a tablet and think they must have USB ports and a physical keyboard. They’ll probably like the 11” MacBook Air.
Some may complain that the MacBook Air doesn’t have an optical drive, but to be completely honest, most people who own a MacBook already have a desktop at home, and those have optical drives. In the past 4 years, I owned a couple ThinkPads and a MacBook. I never used the optical drives on the ThinkPads and I have used the one on the MacBook once, to install Snow Leopard. Every time I need to burn/rip a disc, I do it on my desktop, which is much faster anyway. So I don’t see the point of optical drives on notebooks these days.
Steve said the new MacBook Air is how he sees notebooks in the future. Well, I disagree. I think it’s how they were supposed to look today. All this technology available and yet some manufacturers still have designs from 20 years ago. So I guess we will not be seeing anything like the Air from the others (except by Dell, maybe) in the near future.
And that’s all for the Back To The Mac event. If you read all the way through here, congratulations. You are a very patient person 🙂
I expect to have a full review of iLife ’11 in 4 weeks, and for the 13” MacBook Air later this year or early 2011, so stay tuned!