Yesterday morning Steve Jobs delivered the Macworld 2004 Keynote (there’s only one Macworld a year now…).Here are my thoughts on each of the announcements:

Twentieth anniversary of the Mac
They posted the famous 1984 ad, except the girl is now wearing an iPod… funny. They released a poster. I bought it at eBay already. No new Twentieth Anniversary Mac????

Final Cut Express
This is just to see which Pro features have trickled down to the Express version. Yawn.

XServe G5
About time.

iLife ’04
iPhoto: Lots of nice things… but the only important feature: It’s not painfully slow. GREAT!
iMovie: It’s not slow…. GREAT! Unfortunately, I have no use for iMovie. I’ve used it before and enjoyed it to no end. iMovie was groundberaking and it’s getting better.
iDVD: Another awesome program, which I’ve never used, as I don’t make iMovies nor have a DVD burner.
GarageBand: This is another awesome program, might be as groundbreaking as iMovie. They could sell it standalone for $100 and it’d be still a bargain. But I don’t play any instruments. I have no use for it.

iPod mini
It’s truly awesome! but… still… expensive. Or at least not cheap enough to make me just order one. However, I understand that:
– Apple wants to make more money, not sell more units.
– Margins is where the money is at
– If they sold out all the other more expensive models last month, why make them cheaper?
On the other hand, as someone who paid dearly for an Optio S camera, I value the size on these portable things. It’s hard to say how much the smaller size is worth (as it’s hard to say how much the better GUI is worth when comparing Macs and PCs). It’s not like comparing Megabytes or Megahertz. But it’s valuable. We’ll see how they sell.

Bottom line: iPhoto is no longer free and it’s the only application, besides iTunes (which is still free) that I use on a regular basis. But… can I justify paying $50 for iLife if all I want is iPhoto to be faster??? I think no. We’ll see.

And where are the faster Macs????