MacWorld

Thoughts from the Macworld Keynote:

- Does anyone care about xserve? Who would serve up sites or services when you can get so much more power at a lower cost with linux or FreeBSD boxes?

- Why did they spend so much time on Office? Most people haven't used a new feature in word or excel since 1996.

- Good lord did the iLife part drag on. Steve repeated everything a dozen times, then had a video recap at the end for what we just saw. The garageband section totally dragged at a snail's pace as Steve built up a song step by step, then played it in iTunes, then added it to iDVD. It was clear they were filling time. Also, isn't Garageband.com going to be pissed they stole their trademarks? (update: whoa, apparently they reached an agreement long ago -- thanks john)

- The biggest announcement everyone was waiting for is perhaps the biggest failure. They want to go after the low end flash-based music players that outsell the iPod, so what do they do? They go after their target market by pricing themselves out of it. Steve said "for just $50 more than a regular flash player you get so much more" and the obvious thought is "for $50 more than that you get 4x as much storage in a real iPod". Apple should have made a $99 or $149 price point their only goal, and sold as much iPod they could for that price. A $250 crippled iPod is not a revolution, it's a market failure.

The positives:

- iPhoto no longer drags like a dog when you have more than 100 photos in it. They should have fixed that from the get go, but whatever, it looks fixed now.

- iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD got updates, but they look minor.