Apple Announces iLife '11, FaceTime Mac, Lion, Mac App Store, MacBook Air

Apple once again streamed their latest keynote where they unveiled iLife '11 (more fullscreen and Facebook in iPhoto, Audio editing and automatic trailers in iMovie, Rhythm correction and lessons in Garage Band). FaceTime for the Mac will connect video chat to phones with a Beta starting today. Next we get a preview of OS X Lion which will have an App Store and new UI bits shipping this summer. The Mac App Store will launch on Snow Leopard in 90 days. The New MacBook Air is under 3lbs, 13.3" screen, Core 2 Duo, solid state only storage. There's also an 11.6" version starting at $999 with 64gb of storage shipping today.

Comments

Re:Not very exciting

[schnikies79]

They are *not* locking down OSX. You will still be able to get apps anywhere you want.

Re:Not very exciting

[Desler]

Actually, it's worse than lame as they're now locking down Mac OSX just like they do with iOS.

You mean except for the fact that it was explicitly stated that the app store wasn't the exclusive place to get apps for Mac OS X? How can it be locked down when nothing has changed beyond having a new source for downloading apps from?

Re:Will the app store have the same lock down?

[0100010001010011]

The $99/year is for developers, not consumers.

Re:Is there really a market for this?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

But my sample may be skewed because most of the people I know with Macs are trying to get work done with them.

You're just trolling.

Our Macs do a more than satisfactory job at analyzing large amounts of scientific data. For the mundane stuff, most in our office use Office 2008 for the word processing and spreadsheet and Keynote for presentations. Most are looking to upgrade to Office 2010 to regain some macros in Excel.

We don't do any mechanical work, but I've heard that that a new version of Autocad for OS X was just recently announced, and if needed we can run Pro/E within Linux.

Incidentally I use VmWare Fusion to work on some of our server code before I release it to our public hosts. Our OS X desktops work well with our Linux rack mount servers. Though our Mac Pro really crunches the numbers quickly.

Maybe you just need to hang around different people... ;)

Re:Anyone else noticing the CPU situation?

[LDAPMAN]

They are not using a conventional SSD. This is flash, soldered right on the main board. Since Apple is the largest user of Flash memory in the world they are able to do it cheaply.

Re:App Store looks interesting...

[Americano]

And have they EVER made a statement to that effect about Mac OS X that would lead you to believe they would prevent you from installing software any other way?

They were pretty up-front about it with the iPhone - if you want to distribute to the iPhone, this is the only way to do it.

In today's announcement, it was simply "a way to distribute apps" - not "the only" way to distribute apps. Frankly, I'm not sure why people seem to think that the Mac OS X and iOS platforms will necessarily, or ever, converge to that point. They've stated that they don't intend to lock down Mac OS X that way, and they've made no comments that would contradict that today.

Re:App Store looks interesting...

[Hatta]

OS X is still UNIX.

So is iOS.

iOS is "unix". OS X is UNIX.

So, iOS ~ XBox & OS X ~ Windows?

[namespan]

ultimately, it will have Windows for business, and XBox for consumers. Apple will work on a similar distribution.

Yeah, I think they'll call their business distribution OS X. It'll be a lot like Windows.