Apple announced new products at MacWorld. The first are new flat-panel iMac models. These iMacs look like half-spheres with an LCD monitor sticking out the top, mounted on a swivel arm. They have G4 processors, which surprised me since it makes the iMacs almost as fast as regular PowerMacs. Very cool looking. The second new product is a 14.1" iBook. Other than that though it's not that impressive since it still uses a G3 processor. At this point Apple makes no computers with CRT displays and they also don't make their own CRT displays any more. It's all LCD.

The last new product is iPhoto, which I suppose is more analogous to iTunes than to iMovie. It's supposed to be very easy to use -- just plug in your digital camera and it'll import in all the pictures into a photo album. From the photo album you can organize pictures in different categories and print them easily to your printer or to an Internet printing service. In terms of picture manipulation it's a bit bleak. You can rotate, crop, remove red eye and convert to black and white. The selection rectangle is pretty cool -- it grays out the whole picture except for the selected area which makes it a bit easier to see what your crop looks like.

You can also contrain the crop to various standard photo ratios. Useful if you're going to print these later. Certainly iPhoto doesn't compare with Adobe PhotoDeluxe or just about any other photo manipulation application. iPhoto is designed to be easy to use so it has just a few features that almost everyone uses. Personally, I only really need crop and scale. And iPhoto does do scaling, do you have to export the picture to get that option. Not an extremely easy to use feature but at least you can do it, which means that I'll be using iPhoto instead of PhotoDeluxe since PhotoDeluxe is not Mac OS X native.

The Sharing features are kind of neat. You can print, run a slide show, order photo prints, order a photo album, auto upload to your iTools homepage (I think), and export. Export allows you to export each picture and scale at the same time, create a web page with the pictures, or create a QuickTime movie. The web page is a simple one. It creates thumbnails for you and organizes the pictures into folders and the page just displays the thumbnails without any cool background or layout. The QuickTime movies just flips through the pictures at a specified interval. At least it's a small movie. Strangely, the slide show plays classical music.

Like other Apple software has been doing, iPhoto automatically creates an iPhoto Library folder in your Pictures folder. Mac OS X automatically creates various media folders for new users and the Apple software uses those folders which I find understandable but annoying since I use those folders to store my items and I don't want weird folders stored there. But I guess I just have to get used to it.

All in all I guess it wasn't as impressive a rollout as I thought it would be. After moving the keynote day and giving hints out on the Apple web site I was expecting more. Apple usually is quite low-key about what's going to be introduced at MacWorld Expo. They just let the hype build up by itself without contributing to it. So this time when they helped build up the hype I was expecting something truly revolutionary. Oh well, I guess they just had to a product rollout more like how Microsoft does it.

Unfortunately, I'm not into the iMac/iBook. If I'm buying a computer it's going to be as top-of-the-line as I can afford. But those products aren't aimed for me. They're aimed at my mom and dad and sister. And they're good products for those people. But for my next computer purchase I'm still looking at getting a maxxed out PowerBook for my brother. Still have the better part of a year and MacWorld NY for Apple to upgrade that line, though since they just did that a few months ago maybe they won't by then.