Tuesday, January 07, 2003


MacWorld Keynote 1st Impressions


  • New powerbooks
    • The 12” is teensy! The question is, how small is too small (i.e. how easy to use are the keyboard and trackpad?) The battery life, is, of course, excellent.
    • The 17” is droolworthy, of course, but a little rich for my blood. That auto-sensing/self-backliting keyboard is pretty scifi, and I dig the profusion of ports on the thing.
    • The new ad is hilarious. I don’t think it’s on the site yet. I won’t spoil it for you… you’ll know it when you see it.
  • The software
    • I’m posting this entry with Safari right now. It’s blazingly fast, but I’m severly missing tabs. I wonder why they went with KHTML instead of Gecko? All I can figure is that the project must have been well underway before they hired Hyatt.
    • Don’t have much to say about Keynote, as I’m not the target market, but the Quartz-enhanced effects look nice.
    • I’m curious about the X11 server — namely, will I have to recompile my Fink-installed stuff for it to work?

Overall not a bad keynote. Faster desktops would have been nice, or course, and we’re still waiting for Apple’s next handheld move, but the new Powerbooks and software seem pretty good.


:: Dave Walker 15:27 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/os/osx/apple]
:: tags:

:: Comments (2)

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tp wrote:

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wrt the 12" keyboard/trackpad. I have a 12.1 iBook and find the keyboard/trackpad layout perfect for my needs. The iBook is a tight little unit, it looks like they copied the display hinge for the powerbook... and if they put audio "ins" onto the 12" then they solved perhaps my biggest complaint w/the iBook! one final comment about the 17" why did they put the power button in the middle of the speaker area?
d.w. wrote:

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Cool. From the Apple website (re: audio connections on the 12")
Musically inclined? You?ll be glad to hear that the new 12-inch PowerBook G4 features built-in stereo speakers with an enhanced midrange third speaker, stereo headphone output jack, stereo line-in and an internal microphone.
Turns out the reason they went with KHTML over Gecko is that it's way less bloated of an embedding engine. The official reasoning is here, and jwz's typically more acrid take is here.



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