Impulsive Highlighters

Macworld Mini

Nevermind my disappointment right now about the lack of new portable Macs. I'm just going to have to get over that and hope that they come out with something by the middle of September.

Today's Special Event was quite a Macworld in miniature, don't you think? I mean, new versions of iPhoto, iDVD, Garageband, iWeb, Keynote, Pages, a completely and seemingly brilliantly redone iMovie and a brand new application called Numbers.

And, to top it all off, the iMac has been completely redone for the first time since 2004 and the Mac mini has received a processor refresh and now sports 1.83GHz and 2GHz Core 2 Duo chips under the hood.

iMac

If simply looking at something makes you want to buy it, you know that something has been done right. This is indeed the case with the iMac. I am protected from the almost involuntary urge to place an order by the fact that I cannot even vaguely justify it to myself currently, already having a desktop computer hooked up to a large 24-inch screen.


Now, if you analyze it from a metaphysical point of view... no, actually, scratch that. If you analyze it from a pure specifications point of view, a not unconsequential bit has changed. The CPUs are still the Core 2 Duos, but they are the new Santa Rosa models with the higher clock speeds. The graphics cards have been uppgraded to the ATI Radeon HD series and I wish I had a clue what that meant about their graphics performance, but I am severely out of touch with the GPU industry. The hard drive capacities have been upped from 160/250GB to 250/320GB which, I think, is a very worthwhile thing to do. Also, one of the more decent things that Apple has done with the iMac is upping the RAM limit to 4GB up from 3GB and also shipping the iMacs with a single 1GB chip. Apart from all that, the FireWire 800 port which was previously constrained to the 24" model has now been standardized across the line. Another thing that has been standardized across the line is the 24-watt digital amplifier which was also previously constrained to the 24" model while the 17" and 20" models got a 12-watter. And, of course, the screens are glossy and there's no 17" model anymore. This also means a sad farewell to the sub-$1000 iMac and the pricing structure is now as follows:

The really expensive custom option lets you put a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme chip, up to 4GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive inside this beautiful enclosure, and, well, that's just something. Assuming you have enough green of course. I'm just disappointed there isn't an option for a 512MB or 640MB graphics card, especially for the high-end custom model, not that I'd be getting one anyway, but for all the rich kids out there who'll be complaining about it.

iMovie
The new version really does look delicious. There's not much that I can say here that's really illuminating, but this video really tells it all. 

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