Macworld Keynote

A few thoughts, based on watching the keynote via QuickTime:

  • Phil Schiller was great. He seemed to be a little nervous in his delivery, but he was interesting in a casual, friendly way. If he has a chance to do some of Apple's special events in the future, he'll be a little less awkward.
  • From any other company, this would have been a slam dunk, and people who are unhappy are clearly expecting too much.
  • The iLife 09 upgrades make it a must-have purchase for me. I'm looking forward to working through the Garage Band tutorials, and iPhoto face and location metadata is an omission I've been struggling to find workarounds to. And as an owner of a Flip Ultra, I'm really looking forward to having image stabilization.
  • The 17" MacBook built-in battery seems like a great trade-off to me. I don't have two batteries anymore, I just replace the one I have when it won't hold enough charge anymore. It sounds like that will still be possible.
  • I'm really happy to see DRM-free music on the iTunes Store. I'm less impressed with the all-or-nothing upgrade, but will probably upgrade sooner or later.

Are you sure?

My biggest pet peeve in iTunes is undoubtably how it asks you "Are you sure?" before doing anything, and always in an unhelpful way.

As an example, I mentioned to my wife a Christmas album I used to love. I spotted it in the iTunes Store and clicked Buy Album1. iTunes "helpfully" asked me:

This is a completely useless confirmation screen. If — and we're talking hypothetical here — I considered $7.99 a big purchase and needed a confirmation screen for it, wouldn't I want to know the price, too? Wouldn't this dialog make more sense as:

Are you sure you want to spend $7.99 on an 80s Christmas album?

Really, you're being a bit impulsive here. That's cool, we'll take your money, but we want to make sure you've checked with your wife first.

(Okay, not actually those words. But something involving the price.)

But instead, I'll shake my head at the idiocy, of click "Don't ask me about buying albums again," and never see the warning again. What was the point, then?

  1. After discussing it with my wife, of course. [↩]