First a Garage Computer, Now a Garageband

First a Garage Computer, Now a Garageband -- Watched the annual Macworld Keynote via streaming video yesterday. Somewhat disappointing. A lot of others have commented on the pricing of the iPod Mini, so I won't go there, although it is a cute little machine with almost as much capacity as my ancient first generation 5-gigger.

I'm sure that the Xserve G5 stuff that kicked off the keynote is interesting and important to the IT infrastructure stuff, but as an old clarinet/sax player, Garageband (in the updated iLife '04) was the highlight for coolness. Not insane greatness, but definitely major coolness. My only concern is that it makes the music creation and recording process so simple, that music-reading and -writing could suffer. Someone will need to transcribe all these masterpieces for others to play. Doc looks at the Apple's musical leadership a bit more deeply...

"A sub-par Steve Jobs keynote for product announcements, I thought. Not that it mattered. My main take-away was that Apple is doing a great job of hacking the music industry, and is playing a significant role (how intentionally it's not clear) in the mass market shift from a consumer to a producer culture."

I wonder what the other Apple thinks about this. Maybe it's this.