Apple Keynote thoughts

The first major tech event of the year is the Apple Keynote at the MacWorld conference.  This year the pre-speculation was mainly on the health of Apple leader Steve Jobs.

It was a mixed bag this morning with less announcements than many had hoped for. No MacTablet, NetBook or updated MacMini. Also no home server to address the major flaw of the current consumer media products.

But there were some things worth talking about.1. Face recognition in iPhoto

This was the highlight for me.  Real artificial intelligence built into a consumer product.  Amazing. This is computers doing magical things.

2. Seamless integration of geo-tagging in iPhoto.

The implementation of this with the mapping UI looks stunning.  I called Wellington Photographic Supplies to see if any if Cannon had any digital SLRs with geo tagging but it looks like software is ahead of the hardware.  Does anyone know of a decent SLR that supports geo-tagging yet? I feel an upgrade coming on.

3. Really nice Software + Services integration with FaceBook and Flickr. The books look stunning and we’ve used them as gifts before.  Worth checking out.

4. GarageBand with real artists providing music lessons for $5 a pop.  iTunes is a monetization machine.  Another revenue source for artists.

Nice.

5. iWork applications were updated. Nothing mind blowing there and iWork.com wasn’t particularly exciting. It allows annotations not real collaboration so misses the key benefit of GoogleDocs and Office 14. It must be a big rewrite to build collaborative Office products. Disappointing.

6. New 17″ MacBook. Interesting to watch the battery story. Apple is so slick at this sort of stuff.

7. DRM free iTunes. Already live and I’ve been invited to update my library.  That’s very cool. I didn’t think that would happen. Being able to download iTunes over 3G (3.8MB a song and $.25 per MB) puts the song download about the same as the song price in New Zealand.

My overall thoughts are some real bits of magic appearing and that Apple are executing across their business. There is a real sense of integration across their products that other vendors would dream of. But Apple are far from open.  It would have been good to hear more about Snow Leopard, 30″ displays and the things I mentioned above.

There is no doubt that NetBooks are coming and Apples public road map is currently at odds with that trend. Obviously there are bigger announcements to come.