Mac News Round-Up, 1 Jan 2009
Happy New Year!
On a day when lots of Microsoft Zune media players (thousands? millions?) suddenly stopped working, let’s do a quick round-up of the latest Mac-related news and rumours.
With Macworld just over a week away, the rumours are going strong as usual. Will we see a web-based iWork software suite? Apple’s iWork has its share of fans — it’s does 80% of what you expect from an office suite. After the much-publicised hiccups during the introduction of the web-based Mobile Me services by Apple, they seem to have gotten their act together. Today we have versions of iCal, Address Book and a photo organizer running “on the cloud”; it will be interesting to see how Apple implements word processing, spreadsheets and presentations on the web. It will certainly look better than Google Docs.
The Apple Mac mini has not been updated in a long while. Every time Apple holds an event, the Mac mini is sure to be in the line up of rumours. There are very little details this time around, but we could possibly see a second hard drive slot, and a similar look to Time Capsule, in a black plastic + aluminium casing.
What of the iPhone nano? The rumoured reduced-size iPhone, possibly with reduced functionality, may be announced at Macworld but would not appear until the second quarter of this year.
Lastly for today, what do you do when Steve Jobs doesn’t show up at Macworld? Get the other Steve involved. Steve Wozniak (aka The Woz) always attends Macworld. He’s not going to save the Keynote though, he’ll be helping to launch Axiotron’s Modbook. Since Apple didn’t do a tablet computer, Axiotron fills in the niche — at a hefty price, of course.