Still digesting yesterdays announcements. Seems like one of the biggest things was the introduction of the "superdrive" in high end desktop Macs capable of burning DVDs (regular DVDs that is, ones that will play in home DVD players, not the older, non-compatible, DVD-RAMS which are in cartridges a la zips or 3.5" floppies.) This is very cool, and represents a massive price drop considering stand alone DVD burners were going for +$5000. Now you can get a fully loaded high end Mac with DVD burning capability for less than $4000. I wonder how the MPAA is going to feel about that. And oh yeah, the "superdrive" is also a CD/RW burner! To go along with the drive, apple has some new software. iDVD (along with the popular iMovie) will be bundled with the new PowerMacs giving you the ability to burn DVD movies right out of the box. For professional use apple is also offering DVD Studio Pro which I guess is to iDVD as Final Cut Pro is to iMovie (i.e., it costs $999 instead of $0, but if you're a pro, this is still insanely cheap for serious DVD production.) The big question, for me at least since I won't be buying one of these machines, is if Apple is going to sell this drive as an external unit. Please?
In a slightly related story (or, in what would have been considered totally cool if Apple hadn't introduced the stuff above,) Roxio has unvelied Toast 5, the newest upgrade to the popular Mac CD burning software. And this new version will support burning video CDs (VCDs) that can play in most DVD players. That's good news, but I think I'd rather just burn full on DVDs, thanks.
I guess it's still unclear whether Job's vision of the everyman as multimedia producer will ever pan out, but he is sure offering the tools. They're not cheap, per se, but compared to what you would have needed a few months ago the prices are very attractive. And compared to pre Final Cut Pro days I'd say that the new high end desktop Macs ($3500 for the 733Mhz w/ superdrive, 256K, 60gigs + $1000 Final Cut Pro + $1000 DVD Studio Pro + $1500 monitor = $7000 for what would have cost...what?...close to $200K back in Avid days? More?) actually do represent a real desktop publishing revolution. But like I said, the question remains whether the average person really needs to be making movies of their life. If you just want to play Doom, a Windows 98 system is going to rock these Macs. But if you cling to the idea that computers can be used to make something akin to art, Apple is still leading the way. Now if they can just keep from going out of business...
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In a slightly related story (or, in what would have been considered totally cool if Apple hadn't introduced the stuff above,) Roxio has unvelied Toast 5, the newest upgrade to the popular Mac CD burning software. And this new version will support burning video CDs (VCDs) that can play in most DVD players. That's good news, but I think I'd rather just burn full on DVDs, thanks.
I guess it's still unclear whether Job's vision of the everyman as multimedia producer will ever pan out, but he is sure offering the tools. They're not cheap, per se, but compared to what you would have needed a few months ago the prices are very attractive. And compared to pre Final Cut Pro days I'd say that the new high end desktop Macs ($3500 for the 733Mhz w/ superdrive, 256K, 60gigs + $1000 Final Cut Pro + $1000 DVD Studio Pro + $1500 monitor = $7000 for what would have cost...what?...close to $200K back in Avid days? More?) actually do represent a real desktop publishing revolution. But like I said, the question remains whether the average person really needs to be making movies of their life. If you just want to play Doom, a Windows 98 system is going to rock these Macs. But if you cling to the idea that computers can be used to make something akin to art, Apple is still leading the way. Now if they can just keep from going out of business...
- jim 1-10-2001 3:58 pm