MacWorld 2009 Round-up

By most accounts MacWorld 2009 was considered 'weak' in regards of new products or updates. In fact many may speculate that it was the lack of luster rather than health that may have kept Steve jobs away from this last MacWorld.

Some of the highlights included:
Software Updates:
iPhoto

• Face recognition (Faces)
• GPS tagging (Places)
• Facebook and Flickr

iMovie

• Precision editor with stabilization
• Advanced Drag and Drop
• Dynamic Themes
• Animated Travel Maps

Garageband

• New Garageband store provides users with the ability to buy lessons from artists "Artist Lessons' where John Fogerty or Sting will teach you how to play

iWork

• Keynote: New Chart Animations and Transitions
• Use a $.99 iPhone app to run your presentations
• Shipping today

Hardware
New 17 Inch Macbook Pro

• 1920 x 1200 display, 700:1 contrast ratio, 60% greater color gamut
• $50 anti-glare option
• Up to 8GB of RAM
• New NVIDIA graphics options, discrete graphics onboard.
• Upgrade to a 256GB SDD
• 8 hours on a charge, and can be charged 1000 times  "We created a 40 percent larger battery, with the same weight..." "We can build custom batteries." "Our competition uses cylindrical cells... we've created custom shapes for our cells." "To make our batteries thin we use lithium polymer tech... it expends the life to 3x the industry standard."  "We get up to 1000 recharges... we have a chip in the battery that talks to each cell, and the system adjusts the current accordingly. 3x the charges and lifespan of the industry standard."
   

iTunes

• New Pricing: Over the last six years songs have been $0.99 -- music companies want more flexibility. New pricing, $0.69, and another tier at $1.29
• 8 million songs DRM free and by the end of Q1 all songs DRM free
• iPhone Music store is now avover 3g

   

Perhaps the most entertaining event for folks monitoring the event via MacRumors live webfeed was when the feed was hacked. The play-by-play feed which was constantly updated by MacRumors staff was hacked approximately twenty minutes into Phil Schiller's keynote. In the middle of the continuous reports a hacker inserted a statement that Steve Jobs has passed away. A few updates later MacRumors Staff retracted the statement only to have it posted again minutes later. It was clear that the site had been compromised as tens of random posts including the entire lyrics for Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up song were displayed. The final update from www.macrumorslive.com redirected me to Indiana University's website.