The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

What can I say? Every single prediction I made turned out to be false. An iPhone. The revealing of the iTV (now either Apple TV or Ô£øtv, I’m not sure how we’re supposed to write it). And no iLife or iWork updates. No .Mac updates.

You know those five stages of grief we learn about in health class? It applies to keynotes too. I’m currently in the shock/denial stage. I have just one thing to say though…

HOW IN THE UNIVERSE COULD APPLE NOT UPDATE ILIFE OR IWORK?? And the one more thing was an insignificant name change? Apple, how could you???

Update: Well, I watched the keynote, and it was okay. I remember from when the Intel announcement was made that if you think an Apple announcement is ultra-stupid, just watch the keynote. So I did, and to my surprise, I had absolutely no trouble viewing it. It went 100% smoothly, not a single hitch.

So now I’m beginning to accept the iPhone. I do agree that Apple has some great features, but I’m still not a big fan of cell phones, mostly because I hate cell phone companies. Also, I still think that the $499/$599 price tag is astronomical–and that’s WITH a 2-year contract! I don’t care if Apple can justify it, I don’t have that kind of money to pay on top of a contract. However, I think that we should all wait a while for a few revisions to pass. The features will improve and the prices will drop–after all, the iPod photo was originally $499/$599, and then 8 months later, it dropped in price to $299/$399, and then 3 months after that, the iPod nano came out at $199/$249. So I’m holding out until a lot of things improve, and I may still never get one. After all, it’s been 5 years and I’m still an iPodtheist.

I’m still upset that there was no iLife/iWork, but after seeing the keynote, I’m fairly sure that iLife ’07 and iWork ’07 will be making their online debut in a few weeks. After all, we DID see some really fancy Keynote effects during the keynote this morning (hint hint!), and Apple probably didn’t want to dilute its big news. They did that during the It’s Showtime! event–they released the Core 2 Duo iMacs a week early so that it wouldn’t get in the way of their announcement. They probably did the same thing here too. Shame I can’t take it home this week though.

And there was no One More Thing again.

Anyway, on Thursday I’ll be going up to Macworld to do extensive taping on the expo floor (I might actually get to skip some school–with permission of teachers–to do even more playing around with the Apple TV and the iPhone), and of course, taping of the Mac Podcaster’s Meetup for PreviewCast #022, to be released on Saturday. PreviewCast #023 will see me giving my full opinions on everything taking place at Macworld in a more “sane” edition of PreviewCast. So you’ve seen my initial reactions to the announcements here, I’ll be saving the rest of my Macworld stuff for the upcoming PreviewCast coverage. However, subscribers to Webmacster87.info will get to see some still images of my trips prior to the video episode release (expect them Friday evening), so stay tuned.

It’s 7:43 PM now and I haven’t touched my homework! I’m in trouble… Out.