No Bang

Or the best is yet to come?

Get It Try It

An interesting way to leave the annual January event for the company who tout think different(ly) - not with a bang but with a whimper.

They all did as well as they could but the critics - who get paid to be critical - were indeed critical.

Perhaps highest on the list of disappointments was the fact Apple had no great new products to announce. The closest was the new 17 inch MacBook Pro - but even that came tainted with a controversial feature.

As for the keynote by Phil 'Steve Ballmer' Schiller: Van Baker of Gartner said it didn't quite rock the house and was a low-key event even for Apple; Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat said he was 'underwhelmed', that it was much ado about nothing, and that it felt like a Microsoft keynote; Tom Grant of Ultra Graphics said it was by far the worst he's seen in terms of presentation and context in twenty years; and so forth.

Irreplaceable

Not only is Steve Jobs irreplaceable - the battery in the new MacBook Pro is too. The company claim the battery can last up to five years - but what happens then? Posters at MacRumors haven't been kind in their assessments. [Yet typically today when it's no longer a rumour they're all behind it. Ed.]

There were also announcements of a few cool things such as face recognition components for iPhoto - but iPhoto is an application and Apple are supposed to be making an operating system. And operating system that needs a lot of work for a world that desperately needs to get away from Windows.

'The best is yet to come', sang a floating Tony Bennett at the end. And one must hope so. For this isn't about the 5% dweeb demographic that buy anything anymore.