John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has posted an excellent article on what Macworld Expo was and what it meant to the Macintosh/Apple community.

“Macworld Expo brings together the full spectrum of people involved in this racket. Designers, engineers, marketing guys, managers, the press, and, yes, just plain users. There is nothing else like Macworld Expo, and if it fades away, there will be nothing to take its place. What everyone wishes is that Apple hadn’t done this. That we could plan on coming back next year and have it be the same. But we can’t have that. Apple did pull out. It will never be the same. What it will be, we don’t yet know.”

The article is an excellent read. I’ve never been to a Macworld Expo but it was always something I wanted to do. Without Apple, even if the show survives, I’m not sure it would be worth the effort.

Joseph Henry

Tags:macworld

Here they are:

New iLife:

iPhoto: new ways of organizing and finding photos: face recognition, geo tagging, new slideshow themes and Facebook and Flickr integration.

iMovie: dynamic themes, animated 2D and 3D travel maps, precision editing, better audio options, image stabilization.

GarageBand: Artist lessons that you can buy through iTunes.

New iWeb as well.

New iWork:

Keynote: slick new transitions, Magic Move, theme chooser, 3D chart animations, Keynote iPhone remote.

Pages: more templates via new theme chooser, full screen option, mail merge with Numbers, dynamic outlines.

Numbers: 250 new functions, easier formulas, theme chooser, better charting, links to Pages to update data on the fly.

iWork.com: share documents and add notes.

New 17 inch MacBook Pro with new battery: up to 8 hours per charge, up to 1000 charges, non-replaceable.

DRM Free iTunes! 8 million tracks DRM free now and the rest will be DRM free by the end of the quarter. Higher quality encoding as well. Three prices for songs: $0.69, $0.99 & $1.29. Available on your iPhone via 3G.

All in all a pretty decent MacWorld. Too bad it’ll be the last one.

Tags:announcement, rumor, update, macworld, ilife, iwork

MacRumors posted a nice synopsis yesterday of the most prevalent MacWorld Expo rumors and predictions making the rounds on the internet. Read the entire article here. We know you’re dying to know what our predictions are so here they are in no particular order:

• New Minis and iMacs
• iLife 09 and portions of iWork in the Cloud.
• No iPhone Nano

Ok, so we’re really not going out on a limb here but so what. Sosumi!

Tags:rumor, macworld