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Macworld 'snoozefest' a lesson for Microsoft at CES
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Macworld 'snoozefest' a lesson for Microsoft at CES

by William Maher  on Jan 7, 2009
Tags: Macworld | Apple | CES
Apple fans don’t seem so smug, with neither Snow Leopard or an iPhone nano to be seen at today’s Macworld keynote. But maybe that’s the point. Apple doesn’t need another new killer device when they’ve the iPhone and Mac OS platform to lean on.
Today’s collective sigh of disappointment after today’s Apple keynote at Macworld in San Francisco is perhaps also a sign of how well the company is doing.

We pondered this today over Nevada, after rushing from Apple’s slick Macworld keynote this morning to jump on a plane moments later for another, altogether more chaotic and gaudier tech experience: the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (and which is also why we’re just filing this report).

To say expectations were mixed for today’s Macworld keynote in San Francisco would be putting it mildly – the slogan for the event on banners around the location called it the “dawn of a new era”, certainly a positive spin on what will be the last Macworld for Apple. Steve Jobs was a no-show, his health being not so great.

And with phrases like “snoozefest”, and “Macboring” being bandied about you’d think Apple’s ’09 keynote didn’t go down so well.

We were impressed by news of DRM free music, and the 8-hour Macbook Pro, but they were the only few real pieces of excitement in a Macworld lacking the innovation of an iPhone or iPod touch.

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The Macworld crowd watches Philip Schiller give Apple's keynote


Apple's latest achievements
What Apple has done with the new 17in Macbook Pro battery is add a larger size and capacity battery, without adding weight, or size to the laptop itself. Part of the trick Apple says, was using a custom form battery shape with lithium polymer. The claimed life is supposedly three times the industry standard – a nice trick we’ll be happy to see in Vista notebooks sooner rather than later.

click to view full size image
Apple's Philip Schiller introduces . . . a big laptop


The DRM move has bigger ramifications. By getting an agreement on DRM free versions of 8 million of its 10 million song iTunes catalogue (the rest will be DRM free by March), Apple has seemingly cemented its future in portable music, in particular on the smartphone. We saw plenty of wanna-be iPhone competitors during 2008, and despite some impressive handsets (Nokia’s n96 comes to mind), they just don’t compare to the iPhone platform for music and video. Now, that pesky DRM issue annoying iTunes users is solved, the iPhone will be streets ahead of Nokia and Windows Mobile too when it comes to music and video content.

Can CES shine bigger than Macworld?
Which brings us to CES. While 2008 was a big year for Apple, it also posed some challenges for its competitors – in particular around smartphones and operating systems. While some smartphones we saw in 2008 were clear standouts in their category, nothing still comes close to beating Apple’s iPhone and iTunes when it comes to an all round music and video phone. Windows Mobile devices are getting better – at least the interface is changing, as we’ve seen with Sony Ericsson’s Xperia and the HTC Touch Pro.

Snow Leopard vs Windows 7
On the operating system side, Apple continues to dazzle, with the updated iLife '09 package setting the bar even higher. No peeks at Snow Leopard today, but Apple has already confirmed it will utilise OpenCL to make use of discrete graphics processors – and we saw plenty of examples today of where this could potentially come in useful in iPhoto ’09 and iMovie ’09 (such as realtime previewing of video effects without rendering).

click to view full size image
Fancy face recognition in iPhoto '09 will detect and categorise all photos of your friends


Windows 7, as far as we know, will not take advantage of OpenCL. Though that’s not saying Microsoft isn’t improving its game. So far the Windows 7 beta is receiving cautious approval, especially for faster loading times. While Microsoft promises improved speed, the proof will be in the pudding.

Over to you Microsoft
Today’s Macworld might inspire less awe than in 2008, but as Philip Schiller boasted in his keynote, last fiscal year Apple sold 9.7 million Macs. He claimed that in the US Mac sales are growing twice as fast as PCs. Of course, that’s coming from a smaller base, but nonetheless, that’s something Apple fans can get smug about as attention shifts to CES.

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