Well, now that Apple’s [AAPL] Macworld Expo 2009 keynote announcements have been revealed, here are the take-home items to ponder…
The New 17″ MacBook Pro
For a lot of coding and creative professionals, the 17″ MBP has been their somewhat-portable mainstay. As a desktop replacement, it’s been hard to beat. What has hampered its greater adoption for mobile work, to some people, has been its (practical) limited battery life and its unwieldy shape. Even I was having trouble with the 17″ MBP during my Hawai’i trip.
The new 17″ MBP now is constructed with the same unibody construction techniques employed for the 13.3″ MacBook and the latest 15.4″ MacBook Pro. It also drops the removable battery in favor of a built-in (typically non-removable) battery that has up to 7 hours of usage when the new Nvidia GPUs are used, or up to 8 hours if the dedicated GPU is inactive and only the shared GPU is running. The trend for the glass trackpad sans button is going strong, since it’s here on the new model. Unfortunately, the matte display is no longer a free option: drop an extra $50, and you can have it… and this is a feature that I’ve quickly discovered to be indispensable. The memory limit is a decent 8 GB RAM maximum, which is acceptable to some developers– but even more would be better. 
After all, even I can easily push Mac Pro memory usage past 12 GB, so if I’m looking for a strong desktop replacement, I’d like something comparable. Then again, the 17″ MBP still is limited to a single Intel C2D CPU (although you can choose to customize it with a 2.93 GHz version), so if you’re performance-driven aligned toward CPU tasks, not GPU tasks, then you may pass on this model.
iLife + iWork + Mac OS X = Long Overdue
A lot of people have wondered about the no-brainer aspect of having an iLife+iWork+OSX bundle. Maybe it smacks too much of Microsoft [MSFT] bundling– remember Office?– but for a lot of folks who have to undergo software upgrades on their Macs, a major complaint has been the need to obtain separate packages for upgrading the iLife and/or iWork apps as well.
Now, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 are also being updated, partly to support the stronger cloud/grid integration with Apple’s services (like iWork.com functionality), which are not quite production-ready just yet (“beta” version, in Google terms) and partly to provide additional feature and performance updating.
GarageBand support for music lessons from known musicians? Slick!
Better iMovie functionality, including reintroducing the “removed” features from iMovie a couple (or so) versions before? Good.
Geotagging/mapping and face-image recognition for iPhoto? Kewt, but obviously not for everybody.
Incremental improvements in the iWork apps (Pages, Numbers, Keynote): nice to have for heavy-duty iWork users, but not game-changers for Windows or Mac Office users, OpenOffice.org users, or NeoOffice users.
Media-philes: More Flexibility and (DRM) Freedom
iTunes users have often commented on the issues regarding DRM. DRM-free media has been announced from many of the catalogs currently available from the iTunes Store, with a few more months needed to overhaul the rest of them. Also, a three-tiered pricing schedule is announced (69¢ and $1.29 joining the existing 99¢ price), at the long-standing urging of the content companies. Hopefully, this assuages the content providers’ beefs about stripping or not providing DRM on their items.
Of course, having to pay more money to “upgrade” your DRM-bound songs to their DRM-free versions is not fun. So some people may decide it isn’t worth it… unless the encoding quality is also improved– which for some songs, will be happening.
Now, for iPhone owners, the new fun aspect is the availability of the capability to purchase media via their mobile 3G connections, instead of relying upon their direct iTunes fetch or WiFi access fetch. Clearly a convenience aspect, but it’s nice to have.
… And All the Rest
For you who are attending the ‘expo now, please enjoy the rest of the conference! The schedule appears quite lively, and there are certainly some interesting (and in some cases, curious) products being rolled out.
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