Was Macworld Apple Keynote 2009 really a yawn?

After the Mac Rumors blooper yesterday, I'm actually watching the Apple Keynote Address in Quicktime. Wired calls this years Macworld Apple Keynote a huge yawn - but now was it really?


Wired's primary complaints are that Steve Jobs wasn't there, and that there were no new really exciting hardware. The first point I consider ridiculously exagerrated, Steve Jobs is a great icon, but Apple has a lot to offer besides his turtle neck. The second point is more interesting though - Apple has always pointed out that it is a computer manufacturer though me it's certainly won with it's elegant software - I could almost be happy with running a hackint0sh as long as I get OS X.

This year the show was almost completely focused on software and services (even though they said the focus would be "the Mac") such as iLife, iWork and iTunes Store. This is remarkable, especially as the rest of the world, mac fans in particular, have been moving rapidly towards "the cloud", Web 2.0 services and making the personal computer almost disposable. Apple obviously has every interest to make their beautiful machines everything but disposable, but is this tug-of-war possible to win?

As my old PowerBook's disk grew more and more full and I got a DSLR Camera some time ago, I had to abandon iPhoto for managing my photos, putting my originals on my server and keeping only scaled-down versions in manually managed folders on my laptop. This is obviously both unsafe and messy, but iPhoto simple didn't help me, it was too slow and I don't want to buy Aperture. With the cool features displayed of iLife and iWork (do check out the demos in the keynote!), I'm almost tempted to go back.

Sure I've seen people using iPhoto, but has any of you really spotted in the w iMovie, Pages, Keynote or Numbers "spotted in the wild"? Also, what about my fancy flickr use and Web 2.0? I just fell in love with Google Docs! Well, I'm convinced Apple is struggling both with getting users to their fancy applications, and that they need to get on the train to Web 2.0 and maybe they will get somewhere with their iWork.com beta, but there still is a long way to go. I'll end this rant with a very simple video of why cloud stuff like Google Docs is so great, if you don't know it already, you really, really need to learn:

A yawn or not, Macworld is still receiving a lot of coverage in the press, such as here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

See also my other posts about Apple or Web 2.0.