#FF00AA

It’s a nice night for getting drunk. Don’t you feel like getting drunk right now? I do. Let’s all get drunk together. (I have no alcohol. Help me.)

iLife ’11

You’ll forgive me for not devoting much time, or thought, to that cruel joke of a half hour in the keynote; I can’t be bothered to check but this must be the weakest iLife update since the suite was created, and those iMovie trailers are the most tasteless creation Apple ever presented. Can you believe that Steve managed to come back on stage right after that, and say “awesome”?

FaceTime

I’m quite surprised by the lack of a Windows version. Surely that must be in the works, they can’t expect FaceTime to be a differentiator that will actually sell MacBooks? (Or maybe the iPhone is indeed that powerful and they’re right to withhold it.)

MacOS X 10.7 Lion

We didn’t expect that. Only, we did. All of those functionalities have been rumored and analyst-ed at length before, and not because of leaks but because they’re obvious and simply make a maddening amount of sense for Apple. It’s just not at all what we, the Mac faithful, wanted to hear.

We don’t want a full-screen mode to become the default on most apps, but that’s always what made sense to the average user (how many of your relatives have vehemently protested the maximize button that didn’t maximize?). We don’t want an App Store that Apple has control over, but it also works for the user… and for developers (as long as there remains the option to distribute your app in other ways — which is somewhat unlikely to last forever). We don’t want a Launchpad because… well, because that’s fucking pathetic, it was in OS 9. (But, again, it’s hard to argue that it isn’t a good thing to bring it back.)

Emotionally, this feels like the end of the Mac. The earthquake that had been announced for years, promising to sink the entire country. But, rationally, it’s the only thing that could ever happen, and we could only hope to delay it.

And it’s not like anyone’s gonna force Mac Pro users to buy apps from the Mac App Store and display them full-screen on their 30-inch matte Cinema display. It’s just an added convenience for those switchers who bought a MacBook because they enjoyed their iOS device.

MacBook Air

No surprise whatsoever as far as the hardware goes (and it certainly is attractive), but I’m confused by the pricing. Even if that’s the price point at which they can sell it, I figured they ought to artificially raise the MacBook Air’s price so that the 128GB 13-inch model doesn’t end up at almost exactly the same amount as the 250GB 13-inch MacBook Pro. There were already too many options at this end of the line, but now it’s just ridiculous.

I thought Apple’s lineup was all about avoiding those paralyzing choices?