(REUTERS/Robert Galbraith)

Phil Schiller took slightly more than one and a half hour presenting Apple’s final keynote address at the Macworld Expo. It was, a mostly good and efficient presentation by Phil and though what he presented wasn’t earth shattering, Apple is pacing themselves for a difficult year ahead.

The hits

Here is a quick recap of the products that were presented:

• iLife ’09 – with new iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand and iWeb, available at the end of the month at S$138 (single user) or S$168 (family pack)
• iWork ’09 – with improved Keynote, Pages and Numbers, available now at S$138 (single user) or S$168 (family pack), get the Trial copy to try out the features
• iWork.com – a new beta fee-based web service to share your iWork’09 documents, spreadsheets and presentations,
• new 17-inch MacBook Pro – with unibody case and an built-in battery that lasts up to 8 hours on a single charge and has a 1,000 charge cycle, available soon from S$4,388
• DRM-free iTunes Music store with flexible pricing and over-the-air purchase and downloading of the music onto iPhone 3G

The misses

So after looking back at the recap of pre-Macworld rumors, here are the items that didn’t turn up:

• there is no Mac mini, no revamp iMac, no iPhone nano, no new Mouse, no large iPod Touch
• no Snow Leopard demo
• iWork sort-of goes onto the cloud (just sharing but not editing like Google Docs)
• no web-based iMovie (never thought so)
• and no Steve Jobs

No surprises there. With the current economy situation, introduction of any new revolutionary hardware might faced with lukewarm response from the consumers, pair that with increasing cost of manufacturing, we were stuck with only the introduction of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, while many, including myself, were hoping for a make-over of the Mac mini. This and other hardware revamps, will definitely pop up sometime over the next half of the year.

As for the iPhone nano, I believe we won’t see it appearing anytime in the future.

Snow Leopard, as we already know, will not be one with many new features, but more an improvement of OS X 10.5 Leopard. There will be more bug-fixing, code optimizing and bloat reduction, and we will probably see the announcement of its delivery at WWDC’09 in June.

So how was Philnote?

As for the keynote address itself, Phil Schiller performed remarkably well, considering he has such huge shoes to follow. We felt that he started off with a tinge of nervousness, his pacing was a tad fast and he rattled on and on about the feature lists like a robot. As my friend Wai Keong said, he needs to learn to be a cocktease and milk the crowd with the new features. But as he progressed, he sounded more relaxed and the pacing was much better.

Having Tony Bennett I guess was a hit and miss for the audience, though the choice of songs – The Best Is Yet To Come and I Left My Heart In San Francisco – sure leaves many with more things to discuss, especially with Apple leaving Macworld Expo after this year.

I will look into those new products announced yesterday in the next post.

Goodbye Macworld Expo, hello … ?

So that, is the end of Apple’s involvement with Macworld Expo. No more anticipating at every start of the New Year for new products from Apple. No more pre-Macworld Expo speculations and rumors flying around.

Predicting the next new Apple products has just been made more difficult by a few notches. Instead of the annual events, we just have to wait for Cupertino to start sending out cryptic press invites to know when they will make any announcements.

You know, that might be more fun.

• Stream and watch the keynote here
• Or download the keynote in iTunes here

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