Lions, iLifes, and Airs, Oh My!

Apple had a big PR event today entitled "Back To The Mac" that just wrapped up a few hours ago. The big-ticket items were:

• iLife '11
• Mac OS 10.7, codenamed Lion
• New Macbook Airs

If only they hadn't released Tiger five years ago, I would have had the perfect headline for this post. Alas.

Anyway, I was eagerly following Engadget's liveblog as it went down, and here are my basic first impressions.

The iLife presentation consisted of Apple showing off the new version of three apps: iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband. This part wasn't terribly interesting to me, because I use iPhoto a little bit, Garageband barely ever, and iMovie never. However, there were some interesting things they had in each. iPhoto has even more integration with Facebook than before, letting you see comments on photos that you've uploaded to Facebook within iPhoto! That's pretty cool. Jobs was also very big on iPhoto's fullscreen capabilities, which looked suspiciously like an iPad app. There was a cool part of the app for geotagged photos where you could view the photos on a map, but my camera is sadly not equipped with a GPS unit, so that won't be of much use to me.

Geotagged images show up on a map

As for Garageband and iMovie, it didn't sound like there was much in the way of earthshattering changes. Garageband has new technologies called "Flex Time" and "Groove Matching" that seem to amount to Autotune for rhythm. I'll be curious to play around with it and see how well it works. There's also a set of beginner's piano lessons included in Garageband that can grade you on how well you play a piece of music, again with the iPad-esque full screen view. As for iMovie, there was some stuff about audio editing, and making obnoxious-looking prefab movie trailers, but I never use iMovie, so I didn't pay much attention.

Like Rock Band, but educational!

Unfortunately, Apple being Apple, these upgrades come free if you buy a new computer, but they're $50 on their own, and I don't use any of these apps nearly enough to justify paying for that. Anyway, moving on to the new OS, 10.7 It's scheduled for release in Summer 2011, but Apple hasn't told us much about it yet. The main thing they've told us is that their goal was to take the best features from the operating system used in iPhones and iPads, iOS, and bring them back to the Mac OS.

The Circle of Life

The biggest change is the addition of a centralized, Apple-run App Store to Mac OS 10.7. Unlike the iOS version, the App Store won't be the only way to install programs on your Mac (thank god), it'll just be another option, presumably a very streamlined and easy to use option as it is on iOS. There are some other minor features they want to bring over, but generally they're trying to make the iOS and Mac OS experiences as compatible as possible, which I think is an excellent idea. In fact, they're making the App Store available to people running Mac OS 10.6 within the next 90 days or so, separate from the new OS that doesn't come out until next year. Going along with the idea of bridging the gap betwen iPads and desktops, Apple also introduced the new Macbook Air models, their (long-awaited) answer to the recent netbook niche that's come about in the computer world.

"It's this tiny!"

The new Macbook Air really is quite tiny. Almost a tenth of an inch at its thinnest, weighing a little less than 3 pounds, and coming in screen sizes of approximately 13" or 11", it's basically an iPad with a keyboard, which I think is quite deliberate. Its specs are respectable for a laptop, but specs really aren't the point. It's designed to be lightweight and fast at everyday tasks. It uses a solid state drive (SSD) instead of the ubiquitous hard disk drives we have today. Solid state drives have no moving parts, so they're quieter, more durable, and are much faster to use. The main obstacle to their adoption has been developing the technology enough that they can have the same capacity as a hard drive within the same requirements for space, cost, power, and so on.

Having a SSD should make for much faster boot times for the new Airs, as well as zippier performance overall. They also have some impressive stats for battery life; Apple claims they'll last 30 days on standby, and 7 hours of battery life during average web use on the 13" model (5 hours for the 11"). They're pretty cheap as Apple products go, which means you could probably get technically equivalent PCs for less, but if specs are all you're paying for, you probably aren't reading this.

Overall, this was a very solid Apple event. It didn't have the magic of, say, the announcement of the iPhone or something, but nothing was a disappointment. The Macbook Air is a great-looking Apple netbook, but I'll probably hold out for the next-generation MacBook or MacBook Pro if/when I need a new computer. If I already had a desktop, an Air would be a great lightweight alternative to take to class or on a plane. As it is, my laptop is my only computer, so I do need it to be able to pull its weight a little more then the Air when I want to play a game or run some computation-heavy code.

I'm also very interested to see what OS 10.7, aka Lion, has in store for us, and I can't wait to try out the desktop App Store when they roll it out in a few months. I think the only solid criticism I've ever heard of the iOS App Store is that it's a closed platform; i.e., if you want to write an iOS app, it has to go through the App Store, and if Apple rejects your app for some arbitrary, even unknown reason (which they've been known to do), there's nothing else for you to do. On a desktop, it'll be a simple, easy source to go to for apps that Just Work™. However, if you want to get an app elsewhere, anything from a simple download to source code that you build yourself, that option is still there. Apple is definitely headed in a good direction by looking to convert their dominant success in the mobile market over to the desktop market; here's hoping it works out.