I’m sorry to report that Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote was a bust for me. The entire keynote focused on two new big products: AppleTV and the Apple iPhone. While both look neat, and I may well end up with an Apple TV in the not too distant future, this is supposed to be Macworld, not Appleworld. And Macs were barely touched on.
There wasn’t a squeak about Leopard, which doomsayers will suggest indicates it’s not on schedule. There was nary a peep about quad core Mac Pros, no word of slim MBPs that everyone was expecting, no new iMacs, no iLife ’07 and no iWork ’07. No “Numbers” or “Charts” and no completely revamped Keynote 4. All iPhone and AppleTV.
Apple also changed their name officially from Apple Computer, Inc to Apple, Inc. This signifies the first step away from being a computer company and towards being a generalist technology company. It scares me a little because I would really like them to continue to push computing forward, but it appears the drive is to cash in on media serving, which is now their bread and butter. With over 2 billion tracks sold, it’s hard to argue it.
Anyway, here’s hoping that we still see Leopard this spring.
So, AppleTV was kind of dumb (I agree). However, the iPhone does run OS X which probably qualifies it as a Mac, since every other Apple-sanctioned hardware that runs OS X is also a Mac. Also, they are currently being sued by Cisco over the name “iPhone”. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the name got changed to something like “MacPhone”. So, if it had OS X and the name to match, would you still consider it unfit for MacWorld?
Frankly, nothing is truly “unfit” for Macworld. But it’s still a letdown.
Because although Steve Jobs said “it runs OS X,” it doesn’t. Believe me, it definitely doesn’t run OS X proper. What it runs is a subset of OS X, and a much stripped, weakened subset at that. With no SDK and no way to develop for it, you will almost certainly not be able to run ANY of your Mac apps on it with the exception of some widgets, and that makes it not a Mac.
It’s still exciting, but it’s not a Mac.