Holy crap. Some of the products people have been guessing at have just gone on show at the Apple website.
Firstly, check out the new Mac mini, a tiny PC measuring 5cm x 16.5cm x 16.5cm. Now you can buy a Mac and use your existing monitor, keyboard and mouse. It starts at only £339, and Kim has already tagged it for the living room of our new house. It looks perfect for my mum too. A cheap, headless, tiny Mac. Brilliant.
Next is the iPod Shuffle; a beautiful iPod for just £69. It’s a 512MB (or 1GB) USB stick digital music player, but its ingenuity comes in the software. Plug it in and it syncs with your iTunes music library to transfer a random series of tracks to the player. Pick it up for your run or bike ride and always have a different selection of music. Genius. If you have a small MP3 player then maybe like me you find the most annoying thing is remembering to change the music on it (although you can still drag and drop what you need). No problem with the Shuffle. Yeah, Kim wants one of those too.
There’s an update to the iLife suite, which is now at version 5. But Apple are now selling their own “office” suite of tools. Check out iWork. Right now it’s just the latest version of the Keynote presentation software and a Word processor, but is this a sign of things to come?
There’s also a new version of Final Cut Express that allows you to work with high definition video.
I’m not getting my wallet out yet. I’ll keep an eye on Spymac as stuff gets playtested, and see how it works. It’s nice to see such a catalogue of new toys to start off the New Year with though.
