Apple recently held their Back to the Mac Event where they were supposed to show how they continue to focus on the Mac as a platform and as a significant portion of their revenue. Jobs showed three things, the new iLife ’11 software bundle, Mac OS X Lion, and a new MacBook Air.

iLife

iLife ’11 has some significant upgrades and is relatively cheap for the quality and depth of the software you get from the bundle. iPhoto continues to be one of the best pieces of photo management software. iMovie continues to make it amazingly simple to cut together some home movies with visual panache. Garageband is still one of the best ways for people to learn, record, and publish music with simple software at a low price. Garageband is now also the serious version of Guitar Hero/Rockband since you can play along and it tells you how good/horrible you are, but without any of the fun visuals that the other games provide and I doubt there’s any leaderboards or friend lists.

Lion

Mac OS X Lion (10.7) for those that are keeping track was shown. I should say a small fraction of it was shown; hopefully it was a small fraction. Really everything they showed was nothing revolutionary at all. There was new new Desktop App Store complete with iOS styled home screens (Launchpad), mediocre multi-touch, and Mission Control (Expose Replacement).

The main feature was the new App Store for the desktop. If you’ve ever seen Ubuntu’s Software Center you’ll wonder what all the fuss is about. The only thing it’s good for is making developers money, hopefully that will be much better for the smaller developer rather than the large. Apple will be doing the same 70/30 split with desktop app developers as they do with the current iOS devices, they’ll also have some of the same ridiculous restrictions on the applications as they do on the iOS devices. To go along with these applications they’ve added what are essentially iOS home screens to the desktop with Launchpad. This was supposed to be one of their “big” features, but it’s a marginally improved (if improved at all) version of the Applications Stack that you probably already have sitting in your Dock. You switch between home screens using the fancy new multi-touch gestures built into Lion, you had to scroll through the Applications Stack. This might sound amazing until you learn that the multi-touch interface is going to be provided solely through the “Magic” Mouse and Apple trackpads.

These multi-touch interfaces are really only good for Apple laptops, sine they come with the highly awesome trackpad that no other laptop can match. However, this means shelling out of a trackpad if you want that experience on the desktop. You could get the “Magic” Mouse, but you’ll quickly find it has the ergonomics of a cement bench and anyone with a hand larger than a six-year-old’s might discover a new feeling I describe as Sudden Onset Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Even during the presentation of Lion the mouse was giving the presenter troubles. At least once on the video they showed him having to reach over with his second hand to stabilize the device so he could execute a multi-touch gesture.

Mission Control is the new version of Expose that has been mildly upgraded to let you go everywhere from your Dashboard to the “new” full-screen applications. I poke fun at the full-screen applications because it’s nothing new at all. Windows already does this (Press F11 right now Chrome, Firefox, and even IE will go fullscreen mode), not to mention any assortment of full screen capable OpenGL and DirectX applications that have existed for over a decade.

The main problem with all of this is how pathetically insignificant it was. When I heard all of these things I though, well that should be free. Then they announced that the Mac App Store would be brought to Snow Leopard in 90 days, for free. I’m assuming that might come with Launchpad otherwise they’ll just end up pointing out how similar Launchpad is to the Applications Stack. Snow Leopard was $30 and provided a full architectural overall to 64-bit and a new Grand Central Dispatch OS tool that allows multithreaded applications to take advantage of all the processing power in today’s computers easily along with Open CL to utilizes complex GPUs, it had major changes and was still dirt cheap. Lion, as they showed, is just a marginally shinier version of Snow Leopard. Lets hope Apple hasn’t focused so much on their iOS devices that they’ve completely ignored the platform Apple fanatics got hooked on and more importantly the platform that develops the applications that made their iOS devices so popular.

Air

The MacBook Air always was and still is a fancy thin laptop/netbook with no computational power and virtually zero expandability. Nothing has changed with the newest version except it’s now even smaller. I will say the design, as with most Apple hardware, is fantastic. However, why would I spend $1600 for a last gen, low power CPU, 2GB of RAM, and integrated graphics when I could get a newer more powerful CPU, 4GB of RAM, a dedicated GPU with 256MB of RAM, a 15″ screen, a longer battery, and a real set of speakers for only $200 more.

A great summary of my opinion of the new Air