Apple returns to roots with new iMacs and iLife
Published: 08 Aug 2007 12:14 BST
…it can be uploaded to a .Mac page or directly to YouTube from the iMovie application's menu, in yet another collaboration between Apple and Google. Eric Schmidt, chief executive of the search giant, sits on Apple's board of directors.
Both iPhoto and iMovie also figure into improvements to iWeb, Apple's web page-creation software. The iWeb application improves how Mac users organise their photo albums and videos online, pulling them from the new .Mac web galleries and allowing visitors to preview an album before opening it all the way. And, if people are really interested in your web page, iWeb lets you sign up for Google's AdSense program and make some money if people click on targeted ads on your site.
GarageBand, the final piece of Apple's iLife software, enables budding rock stars to bypass the hassle of putting together a backing band by allowing them to customise templates in different musical styles, from rock and blues to jazz and reggae. Vocalists can then overlay their tracks on top of the backing music and go after that record deal without leaving the home.
Jobs touched briefly on the business world with news of an update to iWork, Apple's office-productivity suite. Pages, its word-processing software, and Keynote, its presentation software, have some new templates to use as backgrounds, but the company finally introduced a spreadsheet application called "Numbers" that has been rumoured for some time.
Numbers is designed mainly to let spreadsheet creators put multiple types of data inside a single spreadsheet without messing up the table. Photos, graphs and charts can live beside data, and they can be moved around the page without screwing up the formatting of the spreadsheet.
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Photos: Apple unveils new iMacs and apps
Apple showed off its new iMacs and its updated home media software, iLife, at its Californian headquarters on Tuesday
Still, Apple made sure to note that Numbers can import and export data to or from Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software, by far the dominant spreadsheet application used in offices around the world. The recent delay of Office 2008 for Mac users will give iLife users some time to get used to Numbers, but, like Office 2008, Numbers won't support macros, Jobs confirmed.
Few of the new features in either iLife '08 or iWork '08 would be considered ground-breaking on their own, with the possible exception of Numbers, Apple's first spreadsheet application since AppleWorks development ceased with the first version of iWork. Most of the new features are evolutionary pieces of the strategy Apple has already laid out for the iLife suite.
The pitch for these Macs and the iLife software is geared directly at the participants in the blogging/YouTubing/Twittering age: "We want to make it easier for you to share your creative works with the world". Of course, you can do all of these things with a PC based around Microsoft's Windows operating system, but Apple is going directly after the taste-makers in a new generation raised on computers, the internet and the expression of oneself using both.
And by extension, it is also cozying up to the huge numbers of baby boomers who would like to think of themselves as young and hip. Jobs says that Apple's only goal is to "ship the best personal computers in the world". He appears to take that construction, "personal computer", very literally: implying that Macs are computers for your personal life, helping you share whatever it is that makes you you with the world.
HP has hit upon a similar theme for its notebook PCs, with an ad campaign based around the tagline "The computer is personal again" that has helped HP regain the number-one market share position among the world's computer companies over the last year. This pitch appears to be resonating with customers, and Apple will continue to push that strategy as we enter the busiest part of the year for the PC industry.
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