Apple's August Announcements – What Was Really Important

On Tuesday, Apple introduced new iMacs, and new iLife and iWork software as well as some enhancements to their .Mac service. They did a nice job of setting low expectations and then over delivering. Let's take a high level view and break down what was really important in what they announced, starting with the best parts.

Brand New Stuff

Numbers. iWork got a third program added to the suite which does spreadsheets in the Apple style. This has been a long desired and speculated about program that will go far helping iWork meet and beat Microsoft Office. Now that there is an Excel counterpart, I think this program puts iWork over the hump as a viable MS Office alternative.

The devil will be in the details as far as how seamless the experience is swapping files back and forth with Excel users on both Mac and PC. Since Excel drives many businesses, this will be a critical issue to watch.

iMovie. It's not a brand new program, but it has been entirely reconfigured so it should be in this category. Rather than making incremental improvements as Apple did with the other iLife programs, it looks as if they tossed the old iMovie HD away and swapped in this one. Two interesting differences: You can see all your video files at once in a library view and you can import video from the newer flash drive based video cameras. This expansion of video camera interoperability will really benefit the iMovie enthusiast how has been wanting a newer camera.


Nicely Upgraded Stuff

New iMacs. These are what everyone was expecting to see and Apple delivered with a base hit. Nothing radical in the makeover: just new materials, faster chips, a new keyboard layout and lower prices. I'm not fond of the black trim under the glass. It smacks of recent car design where the designers can't get the inside and outside to match, so they paint the glass black underneath the windows.

Web Gallery. If you use .Mac, this is a huge improvement over how your photos and movies were displayed on your site. Now when you publish photo albums and movies, the graphics and interface has been brought up to date. There is a bunch of interactivity for the viewer to take advantage of, including how to view large images and thumbnails. My favorite is the Mosaic view that allows a large image next to the rest in thumbnail view, bringing it up to par with Flickr.

There are also new functions in iPhoto and iWeb that make building a Web Gallery ultra easy.

iPhoto. The main event here is a new view for the Library, called Events. These are essentially containers like Film Rolls were, but now they are based on date ranges and can have a large interactive icon. When you view the icons together, you can see more of your growing library at a glance. I expect upgrading a previous library will be tedious.

Other nice iPhoto perks are more editing controls and better printing and ordered product options.


Incremental Upgrades: iWeb, GarageBand, and Pages. Apple's software programs are usually pretty damn good, which creates a problem for them. When they work well, there is not too much more for them to do. The younger ones like iWeb make bigger strides with each new version, but older ones like Keynote don't have much room to make big splashy improvements. These programs had nice updates that don't in themselves make a huge difference unless that is the program you love and use all day.

Minor Improvements. At first glance, it looks as if iDVD and Keynote just got freshened up with new templates. If you are bored with the old templates, the new ones might put you over the top. Personally, I look forward to getting new iDVD themes.


What Happened?!! I really hoped for a whole new .Mac service program with these announcements. That doesn't mean it won't happen soon, but if they were going to do it before Leopard, this was their chance. The Web Gallery is nice and the storage space bump (10GB) is necessary to use it, but I was hoping for this level of attention across the board. Oh well…

What Didn't Happen?!! The Mac Mini is still alive and kicking despite rumors of its impending death. It got small speed bumps, but no price drop. At least they have Core 2 Duo chips now.

Let us know what your thoughts were on the announcements in the Comments section below.

DIG DEEPER

Direct links to information on Apple's web site
New iMacs
iLife
iLife 31 Minute Video Introduction
iLife Tutorials with Video
iWork

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Your Comments:

iWeb seems to be free in the sense that you can use it without a .Mac account and put it on your webserver with your own domain.
Is it right ?

Didier
Macinside.be

 Didier Daglinckx
 08/07/2007  at  04:09 PM

Numbers isn't so much brand new as it is a refreshing update to the '80s spreadsheet program Trapeze. One that I enthusiastically welcome, never-the-less. And, yes, Apple is about to get my $79.

 jsk
 08/07/2007  at  05:16 PM

You forgot the .Mac improvements! 10gb of storage and 10gb transfer. Plus, there seems to be more junk mail controls.

 Mac Fan
 08/07/2007  at  05:53 PM

I think the new iMacs are beautiful. I miss though the numeric part of the keyboard on the wireless one. In the other hand the iTunes control keys are the answer to my prayers. Finally they put those into the keyboard.

Nice machines, i'd like them to put better video cards on them, but anyway, i don't want my iMac anymore. I NEED a new one hehehe (just kidding... or not)

 Juan González
 08/07/2007  at  10:05 PM

I was hopping for Mac Pro Graphics update, it seems the best graphics card is on the Macbook Pros, even the iMac seems underpowered, probably the reason they didn't put any graphics benchmarks like they usually do

 Zahid
 08/08/2007  at  12:09 AM

For Keynote, check out http://www.keynoteuser.com/news/?p=223. It looks like there is a TON of new stuff there. And Jobs said that iMovie was a completely new application. Chris, do you think he's lying? From Job's speech it looks like Pages is a very nice upgrade. I'd say there's a lot of good stuff there. And once we've got Leopard, we'll be flying.

Yours sincerely,

John Davis

 John Davis
 08/08/2007  at  01:25 AM

I've really enjoyed iWork '08 in the day-and-a-half I've been using it so far. I have had some trouble getting charts to work the way I want them to in Numbers. I'm sure it's just me, so I'll continue tinkering, but the Help program and video tutorials were little to no help. Come on, Apple!

 Scott Rouse
 08/08/2007  at  04:00 PM

"iMovie. It's not a brand new program, but it has been entirely reconfigured so it should be in this category."

Other accounts are that it's a brand new program, rewritten from scratch. There are some worries that they lost some very functional pieces from the previous version in the pursuit of new and easier. But hopefully more substantial reviews will find it's got everything needed still for hobbyist video editing.

 David Fischer
 08/09/2007  at  11:58 AM

They aren't just worried David. I've been playing with iLife for the last day or so and I have to say the findings are rather upsetting for anyone who has come to love the workflow of iMovie HD. While it has nice features (the storyboard editing), that is about as far as my love for it goes. Missing are the timeline editing, the audio editing that came with the timeline editing, themes, video effects, transitions, support for iMovie HD plugins, chaptering and direct export to iDVD. Many of those features of what people came to love about iMovie and now that they are flat out missing, it definately causes one to question what Apple had in mind with this "update" to iMovie.

I am happy to say though I have found that Apple HAS provided an update to iMovie HD (v. 6.0.04) on its website for purchasers of iLife '08. All the old features are there, right back to where they should be. So why update a program that apparently has been "replaced"? Who knows...

iPhoto and iDVD - whole other take on those products. I'm a big fan of the event catalog feature of iPhoto (when I imported my old library it turned all the rolls I have organized into events). The keyword function is still a little less then to be desired. iDVD on the other hand has something excellent new themes that have been added, but I have to get a video together to actually work with it to see if its deemed worthy.

I can't speak to iWeb - more to come on that.

Just my two cents

 Donna
 08/10/2007  at  02:55 PM

Thanks for the details, Donna. I plan to upgrade this Fall with Leopard's release. I really like iMovie 06's work process. And while I'm doing modest tasks, I'm now concerned that iMovie 08 will be ill-suited for my work.

Other comments about iPhoto are encouraging -- it's getting closer to my beloved Picasa . And iDVD sounds like it got some nice refreshes, as did iWeb.

 David Fischer
 08/10/2007  at  03:44 PM

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