#FF00AA

I’m probably a little oversensitive on those matters, but I’ll still take it as a little slap on the face that relatively major modifications to the Mac lineup have been announced without a press event at all — nothing to show for it in advance of the Store closing down.

13-inch MacBook: “Unibody” enclosure for the plastic case? Uh… yeah, whatever. (Those Geniuses sure enjoy having you come to the Bar to get your battery replaced, don’t they.) I have to see it in person, but it looks a little toy-like on the pictures, which may be good, or bad — but that design is definitely at odds with every single other Apple product currently available. The new MacBook is also pretty much as light as the Pro now, which doesn’t make much sense for the product lineup, but that’s isn’t news.

27-inch iMac: Hottt. Obviously. Except I don’t like the design — I find that straight horizontal line to be an extremely weird choice, when a simple, uninterrupted black glass pane covering the entire front of the machine would have been so much classier. And it’s a shame that it took this long to finally get video inputs on that thing, but still great that it finally happened. (No picture-in-picture, though. And for some reason it’s only on the 27-incher.) Can’t quite figure out why Apple is evidently adopting the SD card as a Mac standard for good.

Magic Mouse: (God, that’s even worse than “Mighty Mouse.”) I guess having a smaller surface accounts for the need to use fewer fingers in the gestures, but it’s still gonna be confusing to laptop users that they have to scroll with one finger, and swipe with two. Not to mention that the right click seems even more specific than it already was with the previous mouse. I’ll have to play with it sometime, but I still wish they’d finally release an external trackpad. And I don’t think it’s very pretty — or, more to the point, I don’t think it really fits the computers it’s going to connect to.

Mac mini server: Cool. Geeky cool. I mean, it’s just about useless, but who wouldn’t want one? (First I thought it would be super flat, and it would be fantastic. Then I saw it wasn’t thin at all, and was disappointed. But finally I found out it had two hard drives, and now I’m a little horny.)

P.S. I can’t believe the hideousness of that new remote.