Macenstein

Hmmm. Apple’s iPhone 6/Apple Watch event was pretty amazing, so today’s iPad/iMac event has some pretty big shoes to fill in terms of surprises and perceived “WOW!” factor. Did it deliver? Well, let’s find out by examining what I found Good, Bad, and Meh about the iPad/iMac event.

The Good

The new iMac: It has a REALLLLLY sweet 5K Retina display. Other than that, not all that much new here. But it might be enough, given that the iMac is not a power-user’s computer. The release timing is a little odd as next-gen processors aren’t available right now, so we don’t expect any ground-breaking benchmarks coming off this Mac (in fact, given how many pixels the iMac now has to push it might have almost negligible improvements). Unfortunately, the retina display only comes on the TOP model, and it’s $2499. That’s quite a lot more than the $1099 entry iMac, so this is sort of a prosumer/status symbol model, perhaps more suited for photographers than for the average home user. So while I rate this as “Good”, you probably aren’t going to get this, and neither am I.

The new Mac mini: Faster, and boy was it neglected for a long time, so thats not really saying much, but I still love the mini. Its biggest new feature is that the entry level mini has dropped in price by $100 to a $499 starting point. This is a big deal, especially since you usually don’t want the low-end mini, and since you’ll be throwing in $200-$300 to make it useable, a lower starting price is great. I might get this to replace my aging mini which is limping along as a Minecraft server.

iOS 8.1 is coming: And maybe my iPhone 6 Plus won’t crash, will rotate properly, and register touch input correctly! Fingers crossed! (Oh, and Camera Roll is coming back. Remember when they took that away? That was crazy.)

The Meh

Apple Pay: We heard about this last month, and it will be launching next week. At some store, somewhere. Maybe this will be cool in a year. But hey, Baby Steps…

iPad Air 2: Faster, comes in gold…

iPad Mini 3: Faster, comes in gold…

Multiple iPad models… Almost too many: Apple has added 2 new iPads to its lineup, and not killed off any, which means their lineup is getting pretty crazy. Given Apple touted their lack of fragmentation as a selling point for developers, it’s odd they are keeping the iPad mini 1 in the lineup, since it already is not able to run some intensive apps. Spending $300 on an end-of-life device makes zero sense, but perhaps Apple is hoping to make some money off the price-conscious, uneducated and non-tech savvy people looking for their first Apple status symbol. Too bad they’ll have a bad first experience.

The Bad –

No Apple TV update: I own the Kindle Fire TV, and while I only used it for about 3 weeks before losing interest in it, I still sort of like it, and I wish Apple would get off their ass and release the “Game-playing Apple TV” we all know they have sitting there already! Geez, what’s the hold up?!?!

16 GB models? Just like with the iPhones, Apple for some reason has dropped the 32 GB capacity for the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3. As anyone who has ever used an iPad, or iPhone knows, 16 GB is as useless as 8 GB was 2 years ago. Apple adds burst photos, HD slow motion video… and cripples it with basically ZERO storage. I guess this might help push iCloud storage sales, but it seems insanely low for storage in 2014. Also, more people would have upgraded to iOS 8 if they had ROOM on their devices, so perhaps Apple should look at iOS 8’s somewhat sluggish adoption rates and rethink their stingy storage ways.

Tim Cook’s delivery: I think more than a few people fell asleep during this one, sorry Tim.

Conclusion

So there you go. I was not blown away by anything, but did not expect to be either. It was really Apple’s “Incremental Update Event”, where almost everything that isn’t newsworthy (meaning, iPhone related) that Apple makes got a little love. Feel free to tell me how right I am in the comments.