
Lean Steve leads into iPhoto
You must use Safari, apparently, but it’s been place online at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/event/index.html. Tim Cook, Apple COO, announced that the Mac installed base is now 50 million users, and the Mac has outgrown the market for 18 quarters in a row. Apple’s Mac business — not the mobile iOS units — is already $22 billion a year. Apple claims to have a 20 percent consumer market share for PCs.
The first 10 minutes of this event provides accurate ammunition to prove that the Mac tent is getting large enough to justify a switch away from Windows. “Whether you look at the products, or the numbers, or the products behind the numbers, the momentum has never been higher,” Cook said.


New themes for slide shows
Then comes the new iLife demos, starting with iPhoto. Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of Marketing, is showing off “Full-Screen” interfaces for the app. iPhoto now makes slideshows automatically, an aspect that can be used for marketing presentations in lieu of the everyday PowerPoint decks.
There’s also an extended look at the new, more powerful editing features in iMovie. It’s hard to describe how much this program has improved over the last two years. The trailers shown look Hollywood-caliber, using included music and effects. Frankly, iMovie became an embarrassment about three years ago, but Apple has rescued it and driven its capabilities much closer to Final Cut Express.
As always, during a major Apple event, the company’s online store was taken offline so the new products can be unveiled for sale afterward.
Over the first 30 minutes of the Apple event, the brief on the Mac business state and the two most visual iLife apps dominated the stage. iMovie has credits now, storyboards, themes to speed up editing. If you’re using a Mac to create marketing materials, these are marked upgrades to the apps which Apple ships for free with new systems.
Which might be the point here — selling the new systems over a holiday season is going to be easier with this included software’s new features. Apple will be selling the iLife ’11 package for existing Mac users, too. In a real upgrade to the value of these apps, existing users of iLife won’t have to re-purchase the product as we have in the past. There’s a $49 upgrade. Previous versions sold for $79.
There’s no update at all for iWeb and iDVD that is worthy of a demo in the conference. The former never had the simple-build ability for websites in its early releases, and later updates came after the blogging habit replaced a lot of websites with WordPress blogs. iDVD works well enough to burn movies built in iMovie, but the latter’s enhancements seem to have frozen any improvements on iDVD.
GarageBand got a nice demonstration that shows massive editing improvements for the tool we use to create podcasts, one of the most cost-effective marketing and customer-outreach tools. The Mac’s included software make it dead-simple to build podcasts with GarageBand. The fact that a six member band can better mix its music is nice for your off-hours, unless your business is producing music.
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