Apple’s last Macworld keynote speech turned out to be notable as much for what did not appear as what did. Steve Jobs, the company’s chief executive, was the most obvious non-appearance — but also missing were expected appearances of new iMacs, an updated Mac mini and any sign of Snow Leopard, the next update to Apple’s Mac OS X operating system.
Instead Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, gave a 90-minute presentation showing off new versions of the company’s iLife and iWork software suites, a new MacBook Pro laptop with a 17 inch screen and non-removable battery, and announced that in the near future the entire song music repertoire on the iTunes Store will move to DRM-free formats.
Schiller’s breezy presentation could not disguise the fact that Apple had little to show off — and that some of the innovative features in the software being unveiled were already being made available for free through Google’s free services.
For example facial recognition, added to the iPhoto picture organisation programme in the next version of the £69 iLife “leisure” suite of software, is a feature of the free Picasa download from Google, announced on Monday evening. A “document collaboration” feature in the £69 iWork “office” suite, where users can upload documents to iWork.com, “will eventually be a paid service”, Schiller said. By contrast, Google and Microsoft both offer similar document collaboration services for free.
Schiller did unveil one piece of new hardware: a new 17 inch MacBook Pro, a top-end laptop with prices starting at £1 950, which follows the slimline MacBook Air by having a non-removable battery. Schiller insisted that though the new battery requires specialist replacement, it will go for up to eight hours between charges, and work for up to 1 000 charging cycles. “We wanted to deliver our longest-lasting battery ever, but we wanted to keep it thin and light,” he said, explaining the decision to build the battery into the chassis. The use of lithium polymer technology meant that the battery would have three times the industry standard lifespan and charging cycles, he said.
But the focus on the annual updates to iWork and iLife meant that other, expected announcements did not happen, leaving question marks over the future of some of the Apple hardware line. In particular, the lack of any focus on the Mac mini, the “headless” low-end machine which has not been updated since August 2007, and had been the focus of a number of rumours ahead of Schiller’s appearance, has led to concerns it might be killed off.
Also absent were any new iMacs, the consumer-level desktops, which were last updated in April. Some had expected a formal announcement this week, after industry suggestions that Quanta’s factories in China were making new models for launch this year.
The biggest absence, however, was Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, which according to a presentation given last November by Jordan Hubbard, head of Apple’s Unix Technology Group, would appear in “Q1 2009”. That timescale would tend to imply at least a demonstration in January to whet the appetites of buyers for a release by late March. And given that Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer showed off some of the next release of Windows, called simply Windows 7, at his CES keynote on Wednesday, Apple had been expected to try to draw some attention to its own product, which is widely anticipated to marshal graphics processing power for general computing purposes.
The announcement that iTunes will move entirely to DRM-free music formats, nearly six years after it launched in April 2003, indicates that both Apple and the record labels that provide the music see a benefit in not tying songs to iPods or a limited number of computers or digital music players any more. Jobs had called for the labels to drop their requirements for DRM on songs sold through the service as long ago as February 2007.
Mark Mulligan of Jupiter Research said: “Don’t expect it to kick-start the digital music market, which is worryingly sluggish. This is just a basic enabler the market needs for long-term viability. It is, however, crucial for future differentiation of the next wave of digital music services.”
Apple’s abandonment of DRM also implies that it will not try to launch a subscription service for iTunes; having become the largest single seller of music in the US it has plainly calculated that it will make more money from selling songs playable on any computer or digital player than by trying to protect the iPod’s market share through tying iTunes songs to it. — guardian.co.uk