Apples of my i
January 23, 2006 | 12:00am
This is the second of my two-part reportage on Macworld Expo 2006 which I attended in San Francisco earlier this month, so bear with me just one more time and indulge me my Mac mania while I walk you through some pretty amazing discoveries I made there (and one or two less so). I waited at 9:30 in the morning on a drizzly sidewalk for the Apple Store on Stockton St. to open just to be first in line for these software suites I’ll be reporting on – they’d been sold out every day since Steve Jobs announced them in his keynote address – so you can bet your life I like them, and I’ll tell you why.
We normally don’t let the software make the hardware decisions for us – in other words, we don’t buy computers because of what’s in them, tending to take the software for granted for as long as we can type documents, send e-mail, stash some pictures, and listen to some music. What often makes up our mind is the price of the whole blinking box, to whose innards we can be as indifferent as a car’s or a stereo’s, especially if we’re not too mechanically minded (and the fact is, most of us aren’t; and why should we, with errands to run, mouths to feed, checks to collect, and deadlines to beat?)
But the new software packages that Steve Jobs trotted out at Macworld look good enough to make you wish you had the Mac to run them on. Thankfully, they’ll run on old Macs as well as the new Intel-powered iMac and MacBook Pro as so-called "universal" applications.
First off is the iLife ‘06 suite that includes new, more feature-laden versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb. (What’s with all the "i" stuff? The little "i" as in "iMac" originally denoted "Internet," but it’s hard not to see one’s embedded self in it.)
iPhoto is the Mac’s picture handling and sorting program, which means that if you attach a digital camera to your Mac, iPhoto can automatically download the pictures (and even videos) for you to catalog into albums, correct and manipulate, send out to friends, print out as a booklet, or publish and share on the Web. This new version can handle as many as 250,000 pictures – more than most of us can take in a lifetime (after about three years of digital shooting, I have less than 4,000 pictures in my photo library – still a lot more than I would’ve taken had I stuck with my Nikon film camera). Aside from iTunes, iPhoto is probably the Mac’s most "fun" application, something families can share and enjoy.
iMovie and iDVD are for turning those klutzy home videos into professional-looking movies, and for creating eyepopping, widescreen DVDs. GarageBand appeals to the musician and audio engineer in all of us; its vast collection of synthesized instruments and sound effects can perk up the most boring presentations and – as Jobs demoed on the keynote floor – can turn podcasts into much more than speeches dictated into microphones (the very latest "to do" thing, after blogging, which means making your own personal audio and video programs to be broadcast over the Internet and downloaded into iPods).
Speaking of blogging, iWeb finally makes it easy for you to start and publish your own webpage and your own blog within it, upload your pictures to it, and sort things out into sections like "sports," "family," "projects," and so on. iWeb works best with Apple’s own .Mac mail accounts, but it also works with other servers.
iLife ‘06 was accompanied by yet another software package called iWork ’06, featuring the latest versions of Keynote – a presentation program whose stunning templates, effects, and transitions can blow Powerpoint out of the water – and Pages, a collection of desktop-publishing templates that make doing newsletters, journals, posters, invitations, and résumés as easy as drag and drop. I’ve used the earlier versions of both of these, and with absolutely no knowledge of Photoshop, PageMaker, or any of those visual-oriented programs (I do words, words, words), I had a presentation and a newsletter done after less than an hour’s work on each project, dipping into my iPhoto library for the pictures I needed.
iLife and iWork cost $79 each; but the good news is that iLife comes free on every new Mac. If you want to do something special with your next wedding or birthday video or for your next family reunion – or if you just want to surprise your friends with your hitherto undiscovered artistry – give these new apps a spin, maybe on that new iMac or MacBook you’ve always deserved.
First, the Mac may be cute, but it’s underpowered. Very early on in its 30-year history, the Mac instantly became the darling of creative types – graphic designers, musicians, writers – for such simple reasons as giving users a palette of colors and bitmapped fonts to play around with (as opposed to the throbbing green and orange letters on DOS machines). That near-fanatical following actually became a liability, as the mainframe and command-line machos (i.e., those who now miss the old CONFIG.SYS routines) were quick to dismiss the new Smiley-faced Mac as a "toy" incapable of serious work.
Much later, the so-called "megahertz myth" dogged the Mac, whose processor speeds remained, say, at 500 Mhz while its PC counterparts started flirting with the gigahertz range – despite the fact that, to put it simply, the Mac worked differently, more efficiently, and very often beat out its higher-spec’ed PC rival in real-world, heavy-duty tasks such as in Photoshop.
The new Intel Macs should put those anxieties to rest. If it’s brute force you want, these "core duo" machines have it in spades–although again, it’s the beauty and the subtlety with which that power is used in the software that should win you over.
And Mac OS X – pretty as it looks – is as serious and robust as any operating system can be. My American brother-in-law Eddie – who needs a computer as powerful and an OS as rock-steady as he can get for his job as a software engineer for a leading aerospace and defense contractor – was surprised and happy to find that OS X is really UNIX under the hood. (For non-techies, that’s like finding a wrestler beneath a debutante’s gown – hmm, maybe just forget that image.) A long-time Dell man, Eddie now says he’ll give the new MacBook Pro laptop a look when it comes out next month. (I think it also helps that I gave Eddie and my sister Elaine iPods for Christmas – they work fine with PCs, but they work even better with iTunes on a Mac.)
The second misconception people have about Macs is that they’re nice, but they’re-too expensive. If you’re comparing apples to oranges (i.e., cheap clones, such as the "Orange"-branded DVD player I got at Greenhills that lasted me all of three months), that’s true; heck, even an original IBM or Compaq desktop’s too expensive beside a jerrybuilt clone. And yes, there was a time when even we Mac addicts winced at the price tags of our favorite things. (Can you imagine a $6,500 laptop in 1995? That was the late, unlamented PowerBook 5300ce, which you can now get for less than $100 on eBay. The MacBook Pro, on the other hand, will start at $1,999 – computers are actually the only things that cost a lot less over time, in terms of bang for your buck.) That was because Apple used proprietary parts – things used by and useful only to their machines, such as ports, memory, even peripherals like keyboards and mice.
Today you can attach almost any USB thingy to a Mac, or buy RAM used by PCs as well. And you can get a great entry-level but fully-loaded Mac like an iBook G4 for as low as P61,000 (and even much lower, if you‘re a UP student or faculty member, thanks to special educational discounts at ynzal.com).
Third, some people think that moving to Macs means leaving everything familiar – like MS Office – behind. The fact is, the Mac version of MS Office will translate your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations so seamlessly, you won’t even know it’s there. And if (for some strange reason) you don’t like Microsoft, you can download free and full-featured productivity suites like NeoOffice.
The deadline is on Feb. 6, so hurry over to www.microwarehouse.com.ph/appleofmyi/Appleofmyiform.pdf for the rest of the details.
