Bag of hurt… Apple October Event

Apple’s “spotlight turns to notebooks” event finished up a few minutes ago. Some analysts believed that due to the economic climate Apple would release a low-cost netbook to combat the likes of Asus’ Eee PC range. Apple releasing something affordable? Ridiculous. Instead of a relatively cheap (for Apple) $899 netbook, Apple released an $899 (relatively expensive) 24-inch Cinema Display. As well as this Apple lowered the price of their MacBook Air while increasing its graphical power by 4x and increasing storage capacity.

Other than a 24-inch display and MacBook Air tinker, Apple released brand new versions of the 13-inch MacBook and the 15-inch MacBook Pro. We won’t bore you with the details, but these new notebooks are supposedly more rugged because they’re built from a single piece of aluminium carved with lasers instead of layered material welded together.

Essentially if you have been following the Apple rumour-mill for the past few weeks then you won’t be surprised by anything Apple announced today. Blu-ray hasn’t been included on either the MacBook or MacBook Pro because according to Steve Jobs,

“Blu-ray is a bag of hurt. I don’t mean from the consumer point of view. It’s great to watch movies, but the licensing is so complex. We’re waiting until things settle down, and waiting until Blu-ray takes off before we burden our customers with the cost of licensing.”

This has been another underwhelming Apple event, that said, anyone who has previously owned an Apple computer will be desperate for a new MacBook. Shareholders aren’t confident with shares in Apple falling since announcements were made.

So, what next for Apple? A much needed Mac Mini update and a few other bits and bobs? It looks like the market in which they work has matured somewhat and creating new plus exciting products is becoming harder every year. Everything today seems more about refinement than anything else and although they’re pricey, you can’t help but think, “I really want one of those“, no matter how much you try to supress that niggling feeling.