Macworld: Apple’s New Products

By now, you may have heard about Apple’s new offerings :

Mac mini. They did it. A new, entry-level Mac at $499. Six and a half inches square and two inches tall. Think about that for a few minutes. Much of it is Build-To-Order as well (faster CPU, more memory, bigger harddrive, DVD burner, etc.). If you know anybody sitting on the fence about converting to Macs, or have an older machine and want to upgrade, or just don’t like clutter, this might be the Mac for you. Ships: 22 Jan 2005

Apple iPod shuffle. $99 or $149 iPod (512MB or 1GB storage), about the size of a couple of sticks of gum, twelve – twenty hours battery life. Doubles as a flash/USB drive. If you want a cheap backup, maybe your taking some photos or files over to a friends or a family member, this might be the device for you, because it’s not much more than normal flash/USB drives in this range. Ships: Now

Apple iWork ’05 – Productivity Suite made up of Keynote 2 and Pages, Apple’s new word processor, with plenty of features including some spiffy styles/templates, Word compatability, PDF publishing. Noticed that ‘Family Newsletter’ was one of the templates… $79. Ships: 22 Jan 2005.

Apple iLife ’05. Substantial updates to iMovie (HD/Letterbox content), iDVD (many more formats, themes/menus), GarageBand, and iPhoto, which has almost become a replacement for Adobe Photoshop Elements (and some would argue the asset management was better). iPhoto will handle RAW photos, as well as some advanced editing features. $79 Ships: 22 Jan 2005.