Apple Legal and the Steve Jobs Keynote Explosion

1. Well. no wonder Apple is suing Think Secret. They. Practically. Got. It. All. Right. The “predicted” details were spot on almost all of the time. Someone had a serious brain fart when they thought they could leak such detailed knowledge and get away with it. Someone’s gonna get spanked.

2. As an aside, here’s an interesting point. Remember the bit in the Keynote (you have seen the broadcast, haven’t you? :) where Jobs makes a joke about how Apple stocks were down, but there was still more of the Keynote to go? Well apparently Apple shares stayed down, according to Reuters. To quote the article:

But rumor sites had anticipated the new products, and Apple shares fell nearly 4 percent[*].

“I think that the expectations were about as high as they could get for it,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.

So much for rumour sites helping Apple eh? So, Lisa DiCarlo from Forbes, how does that crow taste?

3. Anyway, back to business. The crowd seemed pretty subdued this time around. There was less applause than there were last year, or so it seemed to me. I guess the biggest hysteria came from the sexy hardware, but there wasn’t so much of that this time around. The Mac mini is totally sweet, but the iPod shuffle left me a bit cold. Firstly, it has a stupid name. Secondly, I’ve never seen Jobs have to sell so hard on the merits of a device that, by his standards only a few months ago, was not worthy of Apple’s attention. However, it is the cheapest high capacity flash based mp3 player available, and because of that it’s gonna sell. I might even buy one myself — for the odd time when I don’t have room for an iPod. From a hardware perspective it might as well be “Year of the budget Conscious”.

4. From a software perspective — fwoar! I totally dig the new GarageBand and the iLife ’05 suite in general. Man, GarageBand! Where was this when I was in a band? 8 track simultaneous recording, live notation, pitch correction… I would pay Au$119 for that alone. Hell, I would’ve had to pay a lot more than that for other programs. And this one has four other programs that come with it. And being able to edit HD in iMovie is crazy, considering there’s not that many HD consumer cameras around (and, you guessed it, they don’t come cheap), and anyone who regularly shoots HD could probably afford to get Final Cut Pro HD. I also can’t wait until Tiger is released, with Spotlight and Automator the two features I didn’t know I needed. Kick ass.

[*] I should clarify. It fell 4pc on the day of the Keynote. Since then, Apple has posted record earnings and share prices have shot up again.

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