APPLE'S NEW LINE

On January 11th, Apple Computer released a whole bunch of new stuff. I had been hearing rumors for weeks about this stuff but it finally came out today.
I have to say I'm pretty underwhelmed. The software looks good, but the hardware is dumb.

First off, we get a "headless imac." Actually, they call it a "mac mini," sort of like "ipod mini." Personally, I thought they should have called it "minimac", but hey. Anyway, it's a misguided attempt to supply a cheap, simple computer. It's $500, about the size of a personal pizza and comes with nothing; no keyboard, no mouse, no monitor. I suppose it's good for a very small niche of the population, but it's hardly anything to get excited about. It's basically a $500 hard drive and CD burner. Another problem is that the computer is so small, there's no room for the power supply, so it comes as a seperate box that you plug into. On the website, all the galleries show how clean and simple it is, but only one picture that I found showed the entire system, including the external power supply. Apple tried to do this back a few years ago with the G4 cube. It was the same concept, and nobody bought it.

Next is the new ipod! It sounds so exciting! It really isn't! Like the monitor-less new mac, the ipod has no screen. "Well, how can you decide what to listen to?" You can't. It's called the "ipod shuffle" and basically the point is to use it for random play only. It's "only" one gigbyte, versus the previous 20 or 40gig models and it costs about $100.

So both new things are cheap and simple, but who the hell's gonna use them? I guess I can't blame them for trying to innovate, but these two things seem like big missteps to me. To support my feelings, I'll mention that Apple stock dropped over $4 today. Dammit.

The software is basically all updates of old software like iDVD, iTunes, Keynote, GarageBand, etc. They added one new program, called PAGES. It's a cheap word processor. I suppose it's good for simple and cheap, but anyone halfway serious is gonna go with Microsoft Word. I may hate the practices of Microsoft and their operating system, but Word is a great program.

Anyway, Apple is still da man, but I'll be watching them a little more suspiciously for a bit.