The obligatory MacWorld Stevenote three bits

Well, Steve Jobs' keynote for MacWorld Expo 2006 is over and done with; herein are my three bits on the matter.

• Apple is selling 3 million songs on the iTunes Music Store per day. I find this number absolutely mind-boggling, probably because I buy new albums less frequently than George W. Bush admits his mistakes. (It doesn't help that my musical tastes are totally out of whack with everyone else's...)

• Despite Apple's recent meteoric rise with the iPod, it's still nice to see that the computers are still the main thrust of the keynote (and the company).

• The updates to iLife sound nice, but since I'm (now) three versions behind, any improvement is a step up from what I've got anyway. It'll be interesting to see how the new! improved! iPhoto plays, if only because it's traditionally been the underperformer of the package. As a digital photo nut, I'm taking Steve Jobs' claims of iPhoto handling 250,000 images with several shakes of salt...

• I'm not sure if the iLife improvements will make Apple's .Mac service more attractive to folks. I use it primarily for the short-and-simple email address myself, and I've got no big desire to start photocasting and whatnot. But then, I'm an avowed geek, and I wonder how the non-geeks in the market might feel about Apple's closer iWeb/iLife/.Mac integration.

• iWork got such short shrift in the keynote -- blink and you'll miss it! -- that initially I wondered if the often-rumored spreadsheet application got dropped at the last second (and that some engineers at Apple would get smacked around for failing to meet Steve's expectations). But after Microsoft announced that they were renewing another five-year commitment to develop MS Office for the Mac, I wonder if this was just quid pro quo instead.

• 

  Paul Otellini of Intel appears onstage in a bunny suit. HA! Now there's a photo that's gonna get emailed around today.

• The iMac goes Intel. Considering the iMac got updated just a few months ago, I admit I wasn't expecting that.

• More surprisingly, the Mac Mini didn't get changed at all. Where's my Apple-styled Mac-compatible home theater PC, Steve?

• Finally, the long-overdue Powerbook update arrives -- with a name change. While I can't complain about the performance boost, I have to ask, what kind of name is "MacBook Pro"? It's clunky and unoriginal, and doesn't hold a candle to the long-respected "Powerbook" title. Sure, it's a trivial aesthetic thing (and still beats the heck out of tongue-manglers like Dell XPS M140), but this is just an aesthetic mess IMO.

  And does this signal the start of Apple's shift away from the Power- and i- prefixes? Shall we expect the MacBook and MacBook Pro, to be followed by the Mac Mini, Mac, and Mac Pro on the desktop?

No, I didn't see the keynote live -- that's a tad too geeky, even for me. Instead, I relied on the friendly real-time text updates from Uneasy Silence, Writers Block Live, SchwarzTech, MacScoop/MacosXRumors, and Ars Technica. (Show your love by visiting them and clicking on a few ads...)

To summarize: While Apple's new toys look nice and shiny (if a bit clunky in the naming department), there's nothing here that I could either (a) afford to buy or (b) can run on my antiquated hardware. So my wallet's safe... for now.