Macworld 2009 Summary

January 6, 2009 by Ross McKillop

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that today was the MacWorld 2009 event. I’m going to briefly cover the highlights, as numerous other Mac sites have liveblogged the event, covered every word in painstaking detail, and provided commentary.

The Keynote speech is now available to view online.
iLife ‘09 was released. Some of the new features include: quickly share photos from iPhoto to Facebook or Flickr. Have Sting, Sarah McLachlan, John Fogerty and a host of other musicians teach you how to play piano and/or guitar in GarageBand. A “Keynote Remote” app for your iPhone and/or iPod Touch to control Keynote presentations.
A new 17″ MacBook Pro. Pretty much everything you’d expect (three USB 2.0 ports and a FireWire 800 port, the fancy new trackpad, lightweight etc). Then a twist - a non-removable battery - with an 8 hour (using wireless) charge. Rechargable up to 1000 times - but non-removable. Did I say it was non-removable?
Big changes to the iTunes Store. Most notably, the entire 10M-plus song library will go completely DRM-free (8M tracks now DRM free, the remaining 2M (ish) by the end of the year. To update your DRM’ed tracks you’ll be charged $0.30 per track.

That’s certainly not all of the changes/additions/announcements made today, but a pretty accurate list of the major updates.