Mac World San Fran

Because of the close proximity to CES, I couldn't make it down to Mac World, which is a bit of a shame considering all of the interesting suff that was announced there. Now that some of the announcements have been made I thought I'd chime in on things:

Mac mini

The Mac mini is interesting, especially given how small it is. It's basically Apple's answer to the Shuttle XPC, except a lot smaller. The thing weighs 2.9 lbs and measures 6.5" on all sides (and is only 2" high), it's basically a laptop without the integrated display and reproportioned to maximize desktop space. The specs are quite similar to Apple's PowerBook line - offering either a 1.25GHz G4 or a 1.42GHz G4 as a CPU option. The CPU options are strong enough to be competitive with the Celerons that Dell offers in their equivalently priced systems, but definitely not strong enough to compete with something like a 2.8 - 3.0GHz Pentium 4. Honestly I think the CPU is powerful enough, but where Apple really dropped the ball is on the amount of memory. After extensively using the iMac G5 I found that even on the 1.8GHz 20" model the system is basically bound by memory size more than CPU performance (it only ships with 256MB). The move from 256MB to 512MB in OS X 10.3.7 results in a tremendous reduction in disk swapping, which is very important to the overall user experience and one area where the cheap PCs generally fall behind in.

The price points are higher than I would've liked to have seen them, but honestly $499 and $599 are still competitive. My main complaint here continues to be the memory size. I'd like to see at least the $599 model have 512MB of memory, although I wouldn't want to give up the faster processor for it. Unfortunately for $499 I don't think it will be cheap enough for PC users to pick up as a secondary system; an OS X experiment box if you will. I'd say the limit for that crowd would be $399, although then you could be compromising performance specs which would be detrimental to the idea of giving people a positive OS X experience.

I'm impressed by the integrated DVI output as well as the overall design of the system, which I think give it the edge over competing ultracheap PCs. The Radeon 9200 GPU isn't anything to get excited about, so it won't be a gaming machine, but then again Macs really aren't these days to begin with.

My only other complaint from a personal standpoint are the sizes of the HDDs, I'd like to see a massive HDD size option as this thing would make for a great personal server. It sounds like the Mac mini is using a standard 3.5" IDE HDD, if so, replacing that drive with a larger one shouldn't be a problem... :)

Overall, I think the Mac mini is a positive move for Apple and it looks to be a decent product. I was definitely skeptical of the "cheap Mac" at first, but I can say I'm quite impressed at this stage.

iWork

I've never used Keynote so Keynote 2 looks interesting to me, but there's not much I can talk about there. What truly interests me is Pages - finally a MS Word replacement for OS X. I'd do anything to replace MS Office and Dreamweaver with better native OS X applications on the Mac, while still retaining full functionality. While I'm not so sure about its HTML export capabilities, Pages does look like the application that could rid my Mac of MS Word.

iPod shuffle

I'm not as excited about the iPod shuffle because it is screenless and thus you lose one of the major strengths of the iPod - its interface. That being said, I think including a slider that lets you randomize your music or play it sequentially on the actual unit itself was a very smart move.

I'm not so sure how well organizing your playlists at sync time would work simply because I can see myself forgetting the order over time. That being said, I can also see the music itself being a reminder of the order I put the songs in while I'm actually using the unit.

I'm not much of a flash based MP3 player fan but the iPod shuffle is interesting.

The rest...

The iLife updates are also interesting, but I have yet to try iMovie or iDVD so I can't truly appreciate the updates.

Anyone else have any inputs on the announcements?