Oh Apple (Save the mini)

Hey its the 7th of August and whoa, all the buzz in teh internetz are all about Apple's mac product announcement.



Okay, the crazy deluded Apple fangirl in me decided to dedicate a whole day to this (its really hard here in Singapore, cause its like 1 am local time now and most people are like asleep or busy watching porn or masturbating at this time) so that well any random passerby would have noticed how silly this girl really is. Okay, so I am going to start blogging from whatever info I can get from Engadget's live blogging of the event itself. (Its not like I can fly there and like be there you know. I would have sold my virginity for the iPhone, but for this, its ridiculous)





Okay, first off the Apple store is down, no surprise there.



Umm so the whole event started off with Steve Jobs saying hello and talking about the Mac and how the iMac is like successful and even boasted off with stating again that Apple pioneered all-in-one desktop design. There's even a picture of a Dell desktop, a rather funny but in-your-face kinda appeal. Okay, so he moved on talking about the materials used for the new Macs - anodised aluminium and glass. (Its a big deal really, just go to the Apple website and find out) So next he showed the press the new design for the Mac.

Now, I must say the new design is GORGEOUS but hey, the reason why I like it so much is the fact that it looks EXACTLY like I thought it would be - I even made a few sketches of it. Oh and oh boy was I right about it sharing the same design idea as the iPhone, I mean the concept itself is a step away from 'traditional' mac design - just like the iPhone. Anyways I think Johnny made a very good job on the keyboard, which, sadly was leaked into the Internet weeks ago. Oh and because the display is glossy and is actually glass, a cleaning cloth comes bundled together in the package (I hope Johnny designed this too with a very nice little Apple on the corner).

Okay first glance on the new design:

-It does appear to not have a built in iSight camera but hey, the glass isn't just so we can look at the screen, its to conceal the iSight and the microphone itself.

-The new mac is very anorexic, I feel like dieting again.

But there's a lot of stuff packed into that svelte glass and aluminium casing.

-The apple logo is in chrome, or at least I'm led to believe it is.

-The black, glossy glass screen is not the actual screen itself, one might be deceived into thinking that the new Macs does not have a widescreen screen.

-The silhouette of the new Mac is roughly the same as the old Intel iMacs (yes I had it compared to mine, thank you very much)

-It looked as if there's a lot more screen then there's a 'chin' like from the previous iMac but its just the glossy glass part that's creating the illusion of more screen.

The new Macs are built in with more storage, faster processors and better graphics card than its predecessors which is a true betrayal to its lack of bulk as I had mentioned earlier.

Here are the specs.

$1,199
20-inch, 1680 x 1050 LCD
2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB RAM
250GB SATA
8x SuperDrive
ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT

$1,499
20-inch, 1680 x 1050 LCD
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB RAM
320GB SATA
8x SuperDrive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

$1,799
24-inch, 1900 x 1200 LCD
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB RAM
320GB SATA
8x SuperDrive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro

Okay now the HDD can actually be upgraded to up to 1TB for the 24-inch version - this is meant more for the storage consumption of upcoming Leopard's Time Machine application. You can also pump the memory up to 4gb but I'm waiting for the Apple store to go online again so I can try and find out how far I can configure the new Macs. Okay, so enough about the new Macs, lets move on to iLife and iWork '08. Now there's been a dramatic change over in the new iLife, particularly in iMovie, so much so that its logo has been redesigned. Okay, now iPhoto can not only categorize by day, month and year - it can also categorize in 'events'. So basically you just split your photos into events so you can access it easier, there can even be multiple events for the same day. Another addition is the ability to view and browse only the photos you want to see without deleting those you don't want to look at but would rather keep.

Now iMovie has gone through some radical changes that it now works almost like iPhoto itself. You can have like a whole gallery of videos and what you do is to actually drag and drop video clips onto the editor then edit the movie on the fly. Steve even boasted that you can make a movie in just over 20mins, now that's just whoa.

The new GarageBand looks majorly cute, it even has Magic GarageBand, a very cute name if you ask me.

To compliment and further refine the power of iLife, Apple gives us the .Mac Web Gallery which not only allows you to publish your works to the web on the fly, but also bridges the gap between Macs and iPhones. You can take a photo with the iPhone camera and send it to the gallery and from there you can view it on your Mac, vice versa.

Now iWork which is pretty much boring to me has also gone through some changes, Keynote can now allow you to crate your own animations. Oh and pages also had a few add-ins.

So that's it for the event and the rest of the session is Q/A to which a question was raised about the fate of the Mac Mini, especially since it wasn't mentioned today and the answer :

Tim: "We're refreshing the Mac mini today."

So that's it folks, enjoy the rest of the day and don't forget to check the Apple store and place your order. I'll be getting mine when Leopard releases in October.

Meanwhile Apple stocks are going higher and higher.

I'm still serious about losing my virginity for the iPhone.

Update : Turns out the Apple logo on the new iMac is black. Oh and I'm going to make a purchase this weekend.