Apple held its “Back to the Mac” event and streamed it across the Internet for all to see. The big announcements were a new iLife suite, FaceTime coming to OS X, a new version of OS X dubbed “Lion,” a new MacBook Air, and the Mac App Store. Head past the jump for details and screenshots.
iLife ’11: Comes free with every new Mac, or existing users can upgrade for $49. Available today.
iPhoto ’11
- Adds enhancements to email and Facebook connectivity,
- Adds a new automatic slideshow creation feature, complete with themes and music
- Adds a new letterpress card creator
- Adds fullscreen mode
iMovie ’11
- Significant improvements to audio editing
- Adds a new extremely simple movie trailer creator, complete with epic music and trailer themes (such as adventure movie)
- Has direct sharing to Facebook, Vimeo
GarageBand ’11
- Flex Time and Groove Matching help easily fix instrument and track rhythm
- More guitar amps and effects
- New piano and guitar lessons, can hook up an instrument and GarageBand will coach you
FaceTime: Beta release for Mac FaceTime available today.
- Allows Macs to FaceTime with iPhone 4 and iPod
OS X Lion
- Adds more multi-touch gestures to better organize and access different programs
- Exposé now makes an app cluster if a single application has multiple opened windows
- Adds Mac App Store and Launchpad (a homescreen for apps)
Mac App Store: Opens within 90 days, even on Snow Leopard
- Steve Jobs said it’ll be the “Best place to discover apps,” over iPhones and iPads
- Will have both free and paid apps
- 70% of app revenue goes to app developers
- Apps can go fullscreen and users can swipe back and forth on the trackpad to go between a fullscreen app and other things
- Apps also autosave and resume on launch
- Apple will start accepting app submissions in November
Launchpad: A way to organize apps similar to iOS
New MacBook Air: Available starting today
- 13.3 inch and 11.6 inch models
- .68 inches at thickest point, .11 inches at thinnest
- LED backlit display
- 13.3 inch: 2.9 pounds, 1440×900 pixel screen, Core 2 Duo Processor, nVIDIA GeForce 320m, FaceTime Camera, 7 hours wireless web battery life, 30 day standby battery life
- 11.6 inch: 2.3 pounds, 1366×768 pixel screen, 5 hours wireless web battery life, 30 day standby battery life, otherwise same specs as 13.3 inch model
- No optical drive, no harddrive
- Moves to solid state flash memory
- Price starts at $999, other price and model configurations shown in picture below:
Well, there you have it. If you’re curious, the “Oh and one more thing…” was the MacBook Air refresh. Not too surprising, sadly.
(via Apple’s streaming event)
