Greetings from San Francisco — shortly after the conclusion of the Steve Jobs keynote. Tim was kind enough to highlight the multitude of announcements from the keynote and I wanted to take a moment and record a few of my thoughts after leaving the keynote and checking out a few of the new products on the show floor.

This was a most impressive keynote with Steve being completely on his game. Ironically, I was 4th in line this year which is exactly the same spot I was in line last year. Not being able to sleep while traveling does have its advantages here in San Francisco! Actually, the line was an absolute blast. The weather was nice, we had good WiFi access and a power line just around the corner. Nearly everyone of the first 50 people all seemed to have a Powerbook with them and walking up to the line of people in the dark, you were greeting by a sea of glowing white Apple logos which was quite a site to see.

There is so much to digest and thankfully we have the next 3 days to take it all in but I’m posting this after getting a chance to use the worlds first (to my knowledge) duel processor laptop - the new MacBook Pro. Although I’m not a fan of the name, I do understand the naming of it to get away from the reference to PowerPC chips but once you get past the name, that is one helluva nice laptop and it is fast as all get out. I never thought I’d live to see the day where we had dual processor Macintosh laptops. My initial reaction is that they certainly seem expensive, especially for a 15″ laptop which makes me wonder just how much the 17″ models will eventually cost. The built in iSight is a big plus, especially for traveling as it’s quite common to see people with 17″ Powerbooks with a big iSight attached to the screen (myself included). Then again, the consumer level iMac is now a dual processor beast as well. The specs on both of these machines look incredible on paper but obviously the real world test are all that really matters.

When it comes to software, Apple stepped it up big time today. iLife 2006 adds a slew of serious new features spread across the entire product line. GarageBand in particular is poised to do great things for podcasters. iWeb looks like a nice product for it’s intended audience as well as many of the changes to iPhoto. I have to say, there is a lot to take in but of my initial impressions, the one thing that really stands out is that great new Intel advertisement. It is bound to win big points with the Mac faithful. As of this writing, it is not currently online but just wait until you get a chance to see this thing. It’s witty, cute and laced with Mac vs PCs humor — it was so good they actually showed it twice at the keynote. I’ll post more after I’ve spent more time with the products over the coming days here in San Francisco and if MacWorld San Francisco 2006 was any indication, this is going to be one amazing year to be a Mac user.

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