MacWorld 2006 & The Side Notes

A lot has happened today in the Macintosh universe, as Steve Job’s delivered his keynote address and announced lots of new things, including Intel-based iMacs and MacBooks. This ushers in a new era at Apple, making the era of PPC computing with G4’s & G5’s not quite irrelevant, but certainly in the rear view mirror.

One thing that has not been extensively addressed is the promise from Microsoft to provide Macintosh support for the next five years. This means most likely new versions of Windows Media Player and Office (though Internet Explorer development was halted recently.

The other non-technical issue that seems to dominate the Mac forum sites is the name ‘MacBook’, which at first struck me as quite dumb. However, this was the original name Steve Jobs wanted to use for Apple’s laptop, and was struck down. Further, as the laptops are no longer running on ‘Power’ PPC chips, they are no longer ‘Powerbooks’.

This MacWorld was a success for Apple, and it doesn’t hurt that their already soaring stock shot up over 6 percent today.