Macworld 2009, traditionally the conference or venue at with Apple shows off their latest, greatest and up-and-coming stuff, was last week. At this point it's almost a by-line and not even worth posting about because of the sheer lack of anything late, great or up-and-coming. But I haven't been posting much lately and thought it would at least be interesting to point out that this was Apple's last year to attend a conference of this scale and one which contains their own nickname in the title.

The high point of the conference, the keynote address, the speech/demo a Mac Lover geeks out about all year, was delivered by an underling of Steve Jobs, the Apple CEO who normally gives said address. Jobs was absent because of health reasons. I'd like to give Apple the benefit of the doubt as to how unimpressive the keynote was. Perhaps Jobs likes to show off all the cool stuff, the stuff people will talk about for days, the stuff programmers won't shut up about even though you tell them you have no idea what they're talking about like the Cocoa powered Finder in the next release of OS X, or the 16 Core Intel processors supposedly going into Mac Pros not too long from now. But somehow I just can't do it. Not when an hour and a half is spent on iLife, a consumer level desktop media authoring application suite, DRM free music from the iTunes Store and the 17 inch unibody MacBook Pro (MBP). That last element could be summed up in the following sentence, one that takes less than five seconds to say; it's just like the 15 inch MBP only bigger. But it wasn't and it took half an hour or so to say it. Perhaps the only high point of the keynote address was the announcement of the 8 hour battery life in the new 17 inch MBP. That's amazing regardless of how poor the keynote address was.

Anyway, if you're interested in watching the address for yourself you can find it here. This page at Macrumors.com sums up the event. And if it wasn't $24.95 I'd consider getting this for my iPod Touch.