Macworld '09: a show of no-shows
By Paul Miller 
posted January 6th 2009 6:28PM
posted January 6th 2009 6:28PM
Notably absent:
- Push notifications. This was supposed to roll out in September and is sorely needed.
- Snow Leopard. Last June Apple said the OS was due in "about a year," so we would expect to start hearing a bit more about it -- or at least notification of a delay.
- Matte display options for other MacBooks. Pretty please?
- Mac mini refresh. The little box has become woefully underspecced -- especially for the price -- and is also lagging a little in the design department.
- A mid-range tower. This is just wishful thinking, but seriously Apple: the demand is there.
- iPhone 32GB. In pink, of course.
- iPhone nano. Our hands aren't getting any smaller, and this SimCity isn't gonna get plumbing all on its own.
- iTablet. Sure, it's been every Newton-head's dream since forever, but that doesn't mean the market for a UMPC-ish iPod touch-like device is there just yet.
Aren't there multiple days of MacWorld? I mean, any of these could show up in the next few days of MacWorld...
Of course it was. Apple and the investors was getting tired of the rollercoaster ride the stock took every time Mac World didn't meet expectations. I didn't expect anything and I wasn't really disappointed. I think the only reason the MBP 17 was rolled out here and not alongside the 15" was because they needed time to get it right.
I work for a software company and I can tell you first hand how marketing's insistence on new stuff for the trade show screws up the dev cycle, and things go out half-baked and in general the shit storm surrounding the trade show ends up delaying projects in the long run.
I, for one, would rather see Apple (or any other firm for that matter) launch products when they are ready, and not as dictated by a trade show schedule.
to be honest, I didint think that there was going to be anything all that spectacular aside from the 17inch MBP (its siblings were released long ago - october) and hopefully a new mighty mouse and cinema displays. All that plus a mac mini refresh. Macworld has long been the time for hardware with WWDC being the time for software, and I understand that Apple wants to host its own trade shows for product announcements, but seriously Phil...WTF! This was possibly the most boring Macworld I've seen yet (I've been keeping tabs on Macworld and WWDC for about 3 or 4 years now) and just as I hoped you guys would leave with a bang, you left while everyone slept at your news instead.
Oh well, with Jobs gone I guess I couldn't say I expected much and my thinking was actually that Phil wouldn't deliver to many new gadgets, but no new gadgets? (17in MBP doesn't count as it's sibling have already been debuted) All the software talk was so not work an hour plus of my time.
/Rant over. Time to go make a youtube video on all this...
What about Blu-Ray? Seriously Apple is the only computer company without Blu-Ray. I won't purchase a $2800 + notebook if I can't get factory Blu-Ray included.
Have you been living in a cave? Blu-Ray is a BAG OF HURT, according to Steve-O.
I agree that is just shameful at this point. What world of hurt? My PS3 is just fine. I'm sure their OS can handle it if Vista can
Jobs was complaining about licensing as the "bag of hurt."
I have no use for BluRay or a DVD drive for that matter. Disks of any kind are over. If anything I wish they'd make the drive optional / replaceable with a second HDD or something I can actually use.
I cant' wait to get my hands on that new 17" MBP so there you go. Maybe Apple know their target demographic pretty well. For me, the new 17" is pretty much perfect.
If they said Snow Leopard was going to come out in about a year six months ago... What does that tell you? To start expecting it in January? Is this where a robot adversary in an eighties cartoon would start going "Does-not-compute! Does-not-compute!" and then explode?
All right I guess it's only me, but I am super excited about the 17" MacBook Pro. Maybe nobody else actually needs a long-lasting battery? Or 8GB of RAM? It addresses both issues that I have with my 15" MBP. It's all I was asking for. A quad core would have been nice, but i think that is simply not possible in this form factor and weight, and certainly not with the battery life.
I need both, and I am happy I am going to get it end of Jan. It's only 1 lb heavier than the MBP which is pretty amazing in its own right. If it means I can leave the power adapter at home most days the net weight is actually the same. With a 1920x screen.
I was just going to post almost that exact same thing when I saw your post at the bottom of the page. As a loyal Windows user who has always kinda wanted a mac but never got the guts to actually get one, this might be my chance. I'll have to do Windows and boot camp, of course, but I'm really excited about this new 17" Mac!
I think we all could've figured this out by the absence of all the hands on and first look posts that normally follow.
What a joke. CES is going to be all about home theater and video to the TV. Apple lost this round. People will move on to something else if apple is not going to supply it someone else will. They lost out big time on this one. All of other manufactures will fill there home theater market.
That's "Newton".
I was hoping for a revamped Mac mini too, yet we saw Apple put out facial recognition and identification in a consumer app. If it works well, that is not exactly "meh".
FULL ACK to that post!
Where's that fXXXX MacMini I was waiting for?! Or at least lower that silly price now, Apple :-/
I was really hoping for a 32 or 64gb iphone 3g to be announced. I was looking to replace my razr and ipod in one shot. Looks like no iphone for me.... at least until they up the hdd space.
Me too. More memory. And if they won't put more in, then give us a memory slot!!!
Also absent - in that shot:
Their own NEW cinema display
Would have been used purely as a mirror on that stage
Shiny Shiny
I though like their work on the 17" MBP Battery was impressive.
I don't like carrying a second battery around. Also I hate how all laptop batteries start getting weak after a year or so.
For long flights, you could probably get a MBP external battery pack for emergencies for the same price as current MBP battery packs.
My MBP and other laptops get a little less than 2 hours on average.
If these new all-in-one batteries do get 8, then I think Apple has done a great, environmentally friendly thing here.
++ exactly.
Unfortunately, Apple joins Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony who have laptops that can pull 8+ hours of usage with removable batteries.
This makes this announcement very weak.
Not to mention Dell gives you the option to go up to 19 hours, and HP has an option to last 24.
This all on small, lightweight, road warrior style laptops.
Where on Dells or Sonys website is a 17" laptop with 1920x resolution that weighs 6lb and runs for 8 hours on battery?
Nowhere. This thing makes the others look downright stupid.
I totally agree on iPhone push, what the hell people? Why didn't Phil say something like "it's been harder to do than anything else in our history, harder than the iPhone, harder than negotiating with the movie studios, even harder than getting people to buy Performas back in the day.
Other than the lack of a Mini update, I thought the software was pretty good. The additional revenue stream through Garage Band is a smart move, and the 17 inch MacBook looks like a winnah for the obscenely wealthy.
A tablet is a specialised piece of equipment for specialised jobs, it has no use in general computing.
That's debatable..
Have you seen how nice and easy it was to surf the net on netbooks with "diy" embedded screen sensors?
While I would say thats true, they could easily make a wireless mini keyboard specifically for this that somehow attached. But I say forget about a Touch style gimped tablet and work on a regular mini tablet, that has some resemblance to a touch. Apple has always aimed for college students to use macs, imagine a reasonably priced tablet convertible. I dont know a college student who wouldnt want one.
"What we were expecting, however, was for Apple to come clean on a few things"
But isn't this part of why Apple doesn't want to go to MacWorld any more? They don't want to have to be expected to say things when they aren't ready to say things?
I am so bummed about not hearing anything about a new Mac Mini. I was excited when I started to hear the rumors that it wasn't going to be dumped all together. I have been witing for sooooo long for it to be updated with some newer specs so that it would be worth the money they want for it. It would be a very usful machine to me if it was at least updated with a faster processor and better graphics card. It's so far out of date it's just not worth it. But I guess that's what I get for getting excited over a rumor. Keeping my hopes up though, it ain't over till Steve says it's over.
I don't agree that there's really a market for a mid-range tower. I think the Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro pretty much cover the spectrum of the non-portables. I think what IS missing is the "MacBook Mini", either as a tablet (iPod Touch Plus) or netbook (7"-9" MacBook).
I agree that it would have been nice to see the Mac Mini refresh and tablet/netbook announced today. But, the rumors for the tablet pretty squarely put that in the fall, not now.
man all i wanted was JOBS to say that "blu-ray drives are standard on Apple computers" it that so much to ask for along with the mac mini updated - so i can use a mac mini with a blu ray drive as my media center to run my home entertainment system.
oops is^^^
Ok seriously guys, I've got insiders at Microsoft that said they're actually making a computer and it's going to fly and get it's power from fetuses and magic and they're going to announce it at their next conference, no joke, you heard it here, this is as real as it gets!
I was hoping for an update to the Mac Pro as I am thinking of getting one soon to replace my 6 1/2 year old desktop I rarely use now.
verbiage
It's obvious that the Mac mini isn't a strong priority of Apple, but I'd rather they either fully support it (by updating it regularly) or just canning it altogether. It's extremely overpriced for what it offers, even when ignoring the typical "Apple tax" most Apple fanboys ignore.
learn how to spell. It's "verbiage", not "verbage".
I was hoping Apple might jump into the growing netbook market.
But alas, yet again they have failed.
Luckily HP just released the 2140. That is the Mac Netbook that Apple never made! I just hope we can get OSX86 on it well (the mini1000 is not going so well)
someone should seriously come out with toilet paper with the apple logo on every sheet.
I would have liked to see a Geforce 9800m in the laptop as opposed to the 9600m. The 9600 is probably fine.... but they should have put more horsepower into that beast. Especially if I decide I want to play WoW or something on it, once in a while. Seems like a real nice laptop though. I welcome the 8GB ram capacity and the uber battery life is great. Now if only I could afford it.... Lol
I may pick up the new iLife, mostly for the new Garage Band and music lessons. Already a big fan of using iMovie for school projects.
I'm also hoping for a Mac Mini/Apple TV Hybrid Media Center type device too...
Overall, I didn't feel anything spectacular came out of the keynote... it was.... okay...
"This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a wimper"
Did I miss the announcement of a long overdue refresh of the iMac ... the central desktop of the Apple platform?
Can everyone just stop whining? Are you hell-bent on proving Apple right to bow out of MacWorld?
Apple actually put lots of engineering power behind a new breed of laptop that totally outclasses everything else out there at 17". I can't wait to get my hands on it. They even brought back matte screens for you whiners. But no, it's not enough! Granted, I didn't see the keynote, maybe Schiller was a bit too successful in his anti-Jobs role, maybe it was a snore-fest. I can't help but think they did that intentionally so no-one would miss Macworld...
The sky high expectations of Engadget and others are impossible to meet - it's a losing game for Apple. This and similar blog posts as well are the whinge-y comments pretty much confirm that pulling out of this circus is the best thing Apple could do.
I'm surprised that more people didn't praise the new 17" luxury model of the macbook pro, but hey ... maybe people want a cutting edge chip in their luxury model ... I don't know. I do think the build and the design of the macbook pro is without equal.
But it's legitimate to complain about the lack of refresh on that outdated, outmoded, outclassed, overpriced piece of retroware known as the mini. It's a joke. And I'm really disappointed the iMac wasn't refreshed ... it's also overdue. This is the computer industry and Apple charges premium prices. They should be at the forefront of all these technologies, instead of encasing MOR technology in beautiful clothes.
Style engineering is second to none. Functional engineering is lagging, quite frankly. And value engineering is really beginning to show it's warts. Computers have always been about speed and capacity, first and foremost. And Apple design, no matter how beautiful, can't hide that lack of speed or functionality. Where's the i7? Where's the plethora of discrete graphics cards that have been available on the PC side of the fence since the 5th of forever?
What a bummer. I fully expected to order a new Mac Mini today. I want a HTPC but nothing is made by Dell or HP that catches my eye and all the homemade HTPCs are way too big. The form-factor of the Mac Mini plus a beefier processor and 500 GB HD would start the Mini on the right track for me. Oh well.
No HTPC for now then...
i miss the i7 based mac pro.
I was so disappointed by this too. No new Mac Mini ranks the highest in my sad little book of hurt.
Since nothing was said about the Mac Mini, when do you think they will release it?
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