Hmm…. what should I get? A new iMac? A new iPod video 60GB with that shiny new remote/FM thingy? Or should I just get myself a little Nikon D50 and be happy with it … not to forget a 1GB SDCard and iLife'06 as well as iWork'06?
… It’s not that I have the money, but what would life be without some dreams :D
But seriously. Not that I dislike the new MacBook Pro, but I’ve chosen Apple because I like their small models like my sweet little Powerbook 12". As long as there’s no equivalent I won’t consider switching to the new Intel series. Not that I plan to given that I’m really happy with my new notebook :) On the other hand the new iWeb component of iLife'06 looks quite intersting and might really be useful for people without the knownledge or the time to build a website on their own. I haven’t yet seen the markup it produces, but let’s be honest: it simply can’t be as bad as Word or FrontPage ;)
In general the new features of the iLife components all look nice. iPhoto has its photo limit raised to 250,000 photos, GarageBand has Podcasting support, which seems to be the big addition of every component.
Also the new iWork package looks quite intersting. Not that I need a wordprocessor since I’m now using Markdown for everything small and quick and TeX (for quite some time now, actually) for everything else. But Keynote is a really nice tool for doing presentations. Sure, it’s not as feature rich as Impress or Powerpoint, but it gets the job done. Both tools seem to me more user-oriented than the Sun/OpenOffice.org and Microsoft products though and they definitely come with some really beautiful templates. Actually, I had no time for testing Pages since I had no real use for a wordpressor since I got my Powerbook, but its Word-import definetly looks quite good and it defintely loads faster than and OpenOffice so this alone might be a reason for me to get it ;)
Are they worth the 80EUR each? Good question. At least for now I will stick with the 2005-edition of iLife and Markdown/TeX/S5 but who knows what the future might bring?! Well, perhaps really the Nikon D50 ;)
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