An article in Canada’s National Post hits out at the new products announced by Apple on Tuesday. Specifically, it concludes that other Apple products are overpriced and these new ones are aimed to get more revenue in to support it’s remaining dying products. That is, Apple is dying and is desperate for cash.

Please accept my sarcasm in the next couple of sentences. Of course it is dying. That’s why it sold 4.5 million iPods last quarter. Of course Apple is abandoning it’s interesting products. That’s why we get the Mac mini. One of the most interesting products Apple, or any computer manufacturer for that matter, has designed. The opportunities for the Mac mini are huge. Furthermore, Mac minis get people interested in Apple. iPods get people interested in Apple. Consider the number of school children who’s first experience with Apple is via the iPod. And it’s no fly-by-night opportunity either. The first iPod was launched 39 months ago. Other manufacturers should have caught up by now. But they haven’t. There’s still no MP3 player that’s better than my first generation iPod. Except the later generation iPods.

Apple needs to make products that people want to buy and keep on making them. As a result, Apple builds a loyal consumer base, and like me, some of them become free marketing personnel. I’ve loved Apple since the Apple II – and no other company has held my loyalty for that long.

More than that: I’m writing this blog on a Macintosh, whilst listening to an internet radio station streamed to the same Mac. My working life is made possible because of Apple. Not only is work more productive, cost effective, of better quality and more enjoyable, but I simply wouldn’t have my career if Apple didn’t make the products it does. In many respects I owe my life to Apple. If Apple can make more people feel this way it has a great future.

Tee hee: the BBC correspondent Stephen Evans considers that Steve Jobs may be thought of as a religious leader. He’s not, dummy. Not even close. Steve is a great CEO of a great company. He’s pretty damn good at presentation too. That’s all.

That was my thought after sleeping on the Macworld San Francisco Expo Keynote.

There were a raft of product announcements which had been mostly foreseen by the Mac rumours websites – with one notable exception: no Firewire based audio interface. As expected the family of iLife products were updated, but they’ve never caught my attention. Instead, we had the following:

iWork ‘05

Keynote (the Apple presentation package) used to cost $99. With iWork ‘05 it’s got a long awaited upgrade to Keynote 2 and now costs just $79. But there’s more. iWork ‘05 also includes Pages.

Keynote 2 enhancements include cinema quality presentation, better help and information for presenters (such as previous and next slide views, support for dual displays). It’s biggest improvements are in the areas of animated text (such as you see in news reports), interactive areas (e.g. hyperlinks) and automatic playback. You can now leave a presentation to run itself.

Pages seems on the face of it to be just a word processor, but it is much much more than that. Built by the same people that made Keynote, Pages is essentially Keynote for paper. It’s a template driven, highly configurable page layout package that can produce printer-ready documents. All the usual editing tools are there: paragraph and character styles, lists, tabs, footnotes, headers, sections, columns. But because it’s leveraging the Keynote (and general Apple / MacOS X) technology, Pages also provides integration with iLife, provides real-time page layout modification (resize an image and watch the text re-flow around it whilst you are resizing), and has instant updating to reflect changes made to the template. Like Keynote, one of the best features is intelligent object alignment.

So no Spreadsheet equivalent? No, although it was rumoured that another application Cells would be launched. In my experience, the majority of people use Excel in documents in order to get tables and charts. Pages (like Keynote) allows you to build tables and charts on-the-fly and because they can inherit from the template, all colours, fonts and styling is already in place.

Today, we bought copies of iLife ‘05 and iWork ‘05 for our office. Shipping around the end of this month.

iPod shuffle

Trust Apple to get a Flash based, cheap, MP3 player right. No screen. Simple tactile controls. 512MBytes or 1GBytes of memory. About the size of a USB key. And cheap.

Why is it so great? The iPod shuffle integrates with iTunes better than any other Flash player. iTunes has also had an update to provide additional features used uniquely with the iPod shuffle:

• iTunes can Autofill from any iTunes library or playlist. Autofill makes iTunes choose the music to go on the iPod shuffle. If you want more control over the content, simply turn Autofill off and use iTunes just as you would with an iPod.
• iTunes knows that the iPod shuffle may need to contain non-music files. iTunes now has a feature to restrict how much of the iPod shuffle is used when filling it with music.
• Most importantly, iTunes can, if you want, transcode music down to 128Mbps AAC when downloading to the iPod shuffle. It does this transparently. No duplicate lower quality songs in your library. No extra step to get more music into your iPod shuffle. This feature is truly remarkable and something that was on my wishlist for such a device.

The 1GByte iPod shuffle retails at £99. For this you get an estimated 240 songs playback time (20 albums or thereabouts) and 12 hours battery life. It recharges when plugged into a USB2 port or optional dock.

I’ve had my Apple iPod (the original 5GByte version) since it was launched in October 2001. Whilst there have been updates regularly to 40GByte (60GByte for the iPod photo), nothing has made me want to upgrade. Curiously, this iPod shuffle has made me want to downgrade. I ordered one yesterday. It’s ideal for when I’m out and about.

Mac mini

I never expected this one. Apple’s industrial design is world beating, but the Mac mini is truly remarkable. Small enough to be shipped in the same box as an iPod, the Mac mini is targeted at virtually every consumer imaginable, but especially those with PCs. If you have a keyboard, mouse and display, just add a Mac mini for a comprehensive Apple experience.

The Mac mini is 16.5cm square, 5cm tall, and weighs 1.4kg. Essentially, Apple have taken the guts out of a high-end iBook and refactored them into a new shape. The real clincher is the price: from £339.

I can see this being used everywhere: the home, in businesses (one per desk), at schools. It’s even got enough grunt to be used as a file server.

Thanks to some subliminal persuasion from my friend Mark, I ordered one today. For my music. Currently I have an iBook which serves music to my main work Mac, and to a Slimp3 in my lounge. Trouble with the Slimp3 is it doesn’t play protected music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.

This Mac mini will live downstairs, connected to my hi-fi (and possibly my television). I will use Sailing Clicker software on my bluetooth palmOne T3 to control iTunes running on the Mac mini. Sailing Clicker provides two-way remote control of iTunes including support for playlists, browsing and searching. It also displays track information on the Palm. No need for a display for the Mac mini.

We’re even considering getting one for our business to ship around from location to location instead of using a portable hard drive.

In conclusion

When I wrote my post about 11 January, I didn’t believe that Apple would have the foresight to launch the range and depth of products they did yesterday. I’m more than convinced that yesterday was the start of the real rise of Apple as a competing force in the world of computing and multi-media entertainment.

And we haven’t even got to MacOS X Tiger yet.