Apple Goes Crazy With New Products

Today was the day for the Keynote address at the Macworld conference. This is where Steve Jobs gets up and basks in th elimelight as he announces all the cool new products coming out. You can catch updates about this at almost any mac web site, including apple.com.

There were many rumors floating out there about what the big announcements would be: a sub $500 headless Mac; a flash-memory based iPod; a new Apple word processor.

And you know what? All the rumors were true. The picture here is of the Mac Mini: a G4 based Mac without a monitor (and it also turns out without a keyboard or mouse either). But, it is less than $500. It is about the size of an external hard drive. And other than an anemic 256MB or RAM, it is pretty well appointed. 1.25 GHz, Combo drive, firewire and USB, DVI out, and a 40GB hard drive at the low end. !.42 GHZ, 80GB HD at the $599 price point. Add $67 to get the memory up to a respectable 512 MB, and you are still in good shape.

The flash based iPod is called the iPod shuffle. 512 MB for $99 and 1GB for $149. 120 or 240 songs, approxiately. No screen, so it is shuffle play or single playlist only. Said to have 12 hours of battery life. About the size of a pack of Juicyfruit gum. Hangs from a lanyard round yer neck. Kinda Cool.

iWork is the combination of Apple's Keynote presentation software and the new word processor called "Pages". $79 at your local Apple store.

Whilst all of these are cool, none are necessary enough to get my $$. I bought a new G5 iMac last month (which I love) as well as upgrading my iPod (ther nephew got the old one). I am going to hold off on the iWork. I already have MS Office and kinda like it. If I listened to music when I was working out, I'd spring for the itty-bitty iPod, but that would be a hazard on the racquetball court.

So, cool stuff, but nothing necessary, IMO. I am sure that the Mac sites are swimming with equal parts praise and scorn, but I do note this: the Apple online web site is completely swamped right now.