Macworld keynote stuff

My thoughts about Macworld keynote stuff...

I’m at home working, not at the show, and I haven’t seen the keynote yet, just read the news. But I have a few thoughts so far:

1. The headless Mac is cool. Period. I want five. I won’t even turn them on, I just want them.

It’s crazy to me how Apple hardware can provoke such desire, but it does.

2. I don’t know if the iPod shuffle is cool. It’s not for me—but it doesn’t need me to buy one in order to sell a few million of them.

Which proves that not every Apple product provokes desire in the heart of every Mac geek. (By the way, I do have an iPod already, if that explains it.)

3. iWork is an odd duck.

I so wanted a great—or even good—word processor and spreadsheet to replace AppleWorks.

I don’t use Microsoft Office, and the open-source office products are, so far at least, still using non-native UI stuff. (They look and feel annoyingly weird. To me. But this will change. Eventually. I hope.)

Dori Smith says that Pages is not a word processor, it’s entry-level page layout software. From what I’ve seen so far I agree. Think PageMaker, not Word.

So: no word processor, no spreadsheet.

But—you know what?—I bet somebody out there makes good word processors and spreadsheets for OS X. It’s just a matter of finding ones I like. (Any recommendations?)

4. Tiger, iLife, etc.—yes, all cool, I’m a happy Mac user.