MacWorld 2004: What was NOT said

Every year, mac users await announce­ment of excit­ing new soft­ware and hard­ware prod­uct. Last year, Steve Jobs impressed the com­put­ing indus­try by unveil­ing a cou­ple of new lap­tops (the 12 and 17 inch Power­Books) and offer­ing a truck­load of new soft­ware pack­ages. This year’s keynote, how­ever, was more sig­nif­i­cant for what was not said that what was.

Much will be made about the pric­ing of the mini iPod, with peo­ple debat­ing whether it is too expen­sive or priced well enough so I’m not going to go over that ground here. My view is that any­one who thinks they can get the 15Gb iPod for only 50 dol­lars more that the mini-iPod has made the kind of men­tal leap that Apple expects con­sumers to make.

The deci­sion to intro­duce a 4 Gb iPod was an inter­est­ing one only in the fact that there were no sim­i­lar announce­ments about a 2Gb and/or 1Gb device. The ques­tion here is why did Apple decide not to intro­duce prod­ucts of this kind in the mar­ket­place. I sus­pect that the rea­son­ing here is that 4Gb is rare enough (In my searches, I could only find one com­pet­ing device, which has since been dis­con­tin­ued) that it makes it dif­fi­cult to do side by side com­par­isons between the new mini-ipods and other products.

The other sur­prise was the dis­ap­pear­ance of the 10Gb iPod. What was the issue with it that forced to obso­lete it instead of drop­ping its price to $250?

On the soft­ware end, the fact that no one men­tioned any­thing about the upgrades to iMovie, iPhoto and iDVD being “avail­able for down­load” to quote the often repeated words of last year’s keynote address, was inter­est­ing. The omis­sion was so glar­ing that I doubted the appli­ca­tion had actu­ally been down­load­able in the past but, thanks to Google cache, was able to dou­ble check my assump­tion (See the Google cache for iMovie iPhoto, and iDVD)

I guess the iLife suite did not do so well in terms of retail­ing in the past year. This could have to do with the fact that most of the appli­ca­tions in the suite were avail­able for free (once again, we turn to Google cache for more data). Maybe iDVD and Garage­Band were just not enough to even jus­tify the $49 price tag.

All and all, though, it was a very dis­ap­point­ing event, with very lit­tle to offer. I guess we’ll have to wait until the developer’s con­fer­ence in order to feel any kind of excite­ment for some apple releases this year.

Update:

Jim Heid, from MaciL­ife points out that only updates were avail­able for iDVD. The whole appli­ca­tion was only avail­able either by buy­ing an Apple DVD player or by buy­ing iLife. The rea­son for this is that the appli­ca­tion was too big for download.