I enjoyed reading Thoughts on Steve Jobs’ Macworld Keynote by Richard MacManus. OK, I will have my MacBook Pro the soonest possible, it looks like the most attractive (no, it’s the sexiest) laptop I could own so far.
However I think that the really big thing Jobs announced yestarday is iLife ’06. My guess is that this is the kind of killer suite that will dominate the PC market during for the next 5 years.
This is the “new Office”. “Office” is really a comodity nowdays. You have MS Office but also Openoffice.org which is as good (if not better) and a couple of other office suites that do more or less what a typical user needs. Office documents are getting standarized one way or another (Oppenoffice.org is pushing OpenDocument and Microsoft OpenDocument, read more about the Office standards Battle). Users do the same things with office suites the did two years ago -that’s all they need.
Modern users needs are related to digital media. We have huge collections of photos, audio, and video sitting on our hard disks. We use digital cameras, digital video recorders, PVRs like TiVo and KiSS, we rip our CDs, we download podcasts, music and video from the net. We need to create new digital content (family videos, podcasts, videocasts, etc.), rip the existing content living on CDs, video tapes and other “conventional” media, mix the all together and organize this huge collection of digital media.
iLife ’06 seems to do all that really good. We need applications like iLife ’06.