Electronics news and discussion

[Christiern]

Since we periodically get into the discussion of new gadgets, I thought that a dedicated thread might work.--CA

Macworld Notebook

By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; 1:18 PM

Here's more details on the four products -- shipping already or about to -- that Apple Inc. showed off at Macworld in San Francisco yesterday (and which, for once, the rumor sites were almost all correct about).

Mac Mini
Seen up close, this looks impossibly small. Apple says it measures 6.5 inches square by 2 inches tall, compact enough to be mistaken for an external disc drive that plugs into another machine.

There's a slot-loading CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive on front and a small array of ports on the back: power, security cable, modem, Ethernet, video out (it's a DVI connector, with a VGA adapter in the box), headphone/line-out, two USB 2.0 ports and one FireWire port. That doesn't seem like enough USB ports to me —- a keyboard and mouse will leave nothing open. (Even if your old PC, unlike most, came with USB input devices, it's a pretty safe bet that your old keyboard —- unlike the ones Apple sells —- doesn't include an extra USB port for a digital camera or handheld organizer.)

A small grille above those connectors vents the fan, which Apple says will only generate 22 decibels of noise in normal operation. The bottom is covered in grippy rubber to keep it anchored to a desk.

The $499 model will include a 1.25-gigahertz G4 processor, a 40-gigabyte hard drive, the CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive and 256 megabytes of memory. A $599 model ups the processor to a 1.4-gigahertz model and doubles the disk space.

If you thought you'd be able to tinker at will with a Mac Mini, forget it; Apple says it will recommend that users leave that job up to stores and service centers. There is room inside for an AirPort Extreme card and a Bluetooth module. Unfortunately, only one memory slot is available, so if you want more than a paltry 256 megs, order that when you buy a mini.

Thinking about this, I suspect the Mac Mini's strongest appeal may be to corporate and educational buyers. They can get USB keyboards, mice and displays at volume discounts; they don't want their users plugging in other peripherals; and if anybody needs more storage space, it's available on the office server.

I'll have more on this when Apple can ship one to my office. Whenever it shows up, I don't anticipate any trouble taking it home on the subway.

iPod Shuffle
This tiny device's controls are beyond minimal -- a play/pause button in the center and four buttons arranged around that (volume up/down above and below, previous/next buttons to the left and right) in a pattern that echoes the controls of the first iPod.

The 512-megabyte version can store about 120 songs (assuming each is a 4-minute piece saved as a 128-kbps AAC file), while the 1-gig version stores twice as many. An "Autofill" option in iTunes will fill that space with a selection of songs automatically picked according to preset criteria. You can also set an iPod Shuffle to double as an external USB keychain drive by adjusting an option in iTunes.

Apple says the battery is good for 12 hours of use, but Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president for hardware marketing, suggested I'd see a longer time in actual use. (If so, that would be consistent with what I've experienced with other iPods.)

There's no display at all. You can't tell what song is playing now or next. The only readouts are two LEDs, one to confirm button presses and another to indicate battery life.

"It was a very conscious decision to not put a display in," Joswiak said. Rather than cramming in some interface that would make finding your music a pain, the shuffle's limited controls "allow the music to find you."

Marketing blather? Maybe. Either way, the Apple Store on Market Street here sold out its Shuffles by around 5:30, an employee told me. (In my hotel, I met a teenage guy who said he'd bought the first one after sprinting the few blocks from the Moscone Center to the store. He must have gotten there in a hurry; he said the staff initially didn't know what gadget he was talking about.)

iLife '05
Apple's multimedia suite got a reasonably large update ($79 but free on new Macs, shipping Jan. 22) at this year's show.

Like last year, iPhoto needed and got the bulk of the updates. It now offers a calendar-view option like what you get in Adobe's excellent Photoshop Album and Elements programs, the ability to group albums inside folders, and a massively upgraded set of editing options. An "adjust" button pops out a set of controls that lets you tweak a picture's color levels, saturation, sharpness and other criteria, then straighten it so the horizon in a sunset shot is level.

iPhoto slideshows offer extra transitions and can be saved for further refinement, and the photo books you can order through the program can now be custom-designed through a new interface. But the most appealing change may be the one that I didn't hear about until a mid-afternoon briefing on Tuesday: 4-by-6 prints ordered online will go for only 19 cents each starting Jan. 22, down from 39 cents a pop now.

With iMovie, the big improvement may be a "Magic iMovie" option that grabs all the footage off a digital camcorder, detects the scene breaks, inserts transitions and asks you to add a title and credits before burning it to disc. If you happen to own a high-definition camcorder, it will also allow you to edit that footage in its full resolution -- but until high-def DVD recorders show up in Apple's computers, you can only send it back to the camcorder's tape. (Note: The Sony camcorder that Apple chief Steve Jobs showed off at the keynote lists for $3,500.)

The improvements in iDVD and GarageBand seem smaller in comparison. iDVD gains new menu-screen themes (you can put a preview clip in a frame that will itself move on the screen) and supports both DVD-RW and DVD+RW formats, an overdue recognition by Apple industry trends. What it hasn't gained is support for non-Apple DVD drives. If you buy a new Mac Mini, feel inspired to start editing movies and plug a DVD burner into that desktop's FireWire port; iDVD won't help. (Apple's suggestion was to buy its DVD Studio Pro program, which costs as much as the Mac Mini.)

As for GarageBand, Apple says it can record up to eight tracks at once, fix pitch and timing for any track, and allow real-time music notation. Singer-songwriter John Mayer demoed that by playing a few notes on a keyboard; as he hit each key, the GarageBand screen marked that note out on a scale.

iWork
This $79 bundle, shipping Jan. 22, consists of an upgraded version of the Keynote presentation program and a new application called Pages.


Keynote 2 doesn't strike me as big news, but I also don't crank out presentations for a living or a hobby. It has new themes, support for animated text and a presenter mode that helps you talk your way through a slide show.


Pages, on the other hand, is the first word processor or page-layout app Apple has cooked up in years. It aims to bridge the gap between the stilted design tools bolted onto word processors and the difficult, unwieldy desktop-publishing features of programs like Quark Xpress or PageMaker. You can drag in a picture (or select one from your iPhoto library, which is accessible through a click or two) onto a page and have text automatically flow around it, instead of tinkering with text-wrap options or graphics frames.


Pages can read Microsoft Word files, using a translator Apple developed in-house, but if you were thinking of using it to replace Word, Apple's answer is "no." In any case, iWork won't be bundled on any Macs -- meaning that, for many home users, the choice will be between shelling out $79 for iWork or $150 for the Student and Teacher Edition of Microsoft Office, a bundle that also includes a spreadsheet program.