Mac mini was the highlight, but Pages and the new Keynote look interesting, iLife 05 is fine, I'm unsure of the HD dominance, DV is still mainstream, but it may catch on, though 2700 pounds for a HD camera is a lot of money, not prosumer, yet.
Mac mini may well put paid to the mini-itx dreams of quite a few of the hackers I know, 339 pounds plays well against the possible costs of the M1000/EPIA based linux boxes and you get iLife instead of unix toys. I can see them flying off the shelves, yet in hindsight an old retired iBook is quite accomplished, for the minute at least. Adding memory or the wireless adaptors, keyboard and mouse etc, soon pushes the price over 500 quid.
To return to Keynote, the new presenter tools with next slide preview, timings, a clock and elapsed times look very nice indeed. Masking images is a nice touch too. Pages has less to recommend it, but it seems aimed at those people who need colour in documents. There are many of them, schools, small businesses, restaurants, voluntary organisations etc. Pages strikes me as something like a cheap Word; cut down Quark; MS Publisher done right; though I would not want to write a long document with other people in it I think. SubEthaEdit springs to mind for that, but I digress. The pair for 50 quid is a bargain.
So finally onto the iPod Shuffle, initally I was against this, thinking it a bad thing, I mean only 120 tracks. Then I saw a picture and the price. It is 69 quid, half gig usb thumb drives are 45 quid from no-name people on dabs.com. Perfect for running with and it acts as a flash drive too. I'm now in fact quite sold on the idea, music machine for running with and a bigger flash drive, though, as I mentioned to Tom, it is not edible. I think they got the words the wrong way around, eat is British English and chew is American, see footnote 2 on the iPod Shuffle page to understand what we are going on about, images saved for posterity on Tom's site.
All of these exciting toys are available on the Apple Store UK.
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