Just got into work after watching the keynote address at the Newport Beach Apple Store. As I expected it was pretty much focused solely on Jaguar with the only hardware news being the new 20GB iPod and 17″ iMac. Curiously, there was no mention of the Xserve. I would have figured that Jobs would have at least mentioned what the early sales numbers are like (or even an acknowledgment that they’re shipping).
I suspect that the big gripe is going to be over the iTools-to-.Mac rebranding and the $99 yearly charge. I’ve already seen a couple of “bait-and-switch” comments over in the Slashdot comments, which I can vaguely understand. But folks, it’s (well, was) a free service. Would you rather that Apple dropped iTools completely? Apple probably could have eased the pain a little bit by charging $49/year outright.
Speaking only for myself, it’s totally worth the $49/year grandfather price for triple the imap mail storage and the ability to publish my calendar and address book across several computers. Your mileage, as they all say, may vary.
As for the rest of the keynote, uh, yeah yeah go Steve. Though for the first time ever, the one object of technolust demoed at a Macworld keynote wasn’t an Apple product… It was that awesome GPRS phone Steve was showing off. I want one. I really don’t want to switch away from AT&T in order to use one though.
Now if only I could get that iDVD 2.1 updater to download.