garage me up

Apple have announced a bunch of new stuff, much of which is Q. exciting, if you like that sort of thing. A new, smaller, iPod, as predicted, which is 249 dorrar or 199 pound. Problem there being the comfort zone they always build in when dealing with exchange rates. If people would join the dots they'd realise that not being in the Euro is always going to make things like this a lot more expensive.

You add 10% to the US price when converting to Euros, in case the exchange rate goes squiffy. Then you add another 10% when converting from Euros to pounds, and you have the ridiculously high UK price. The problem for the consumer will be the choice between the new, dinky, 4GB (in shocking pink or similar), or the new, entry-level 15GB model, which is only about 35 GBP more expensive.

The other new bit from Apple is a new version of iLife, the suite of sort-of creative tools. It's good to see a much improved version of iPhoto, because it gets to be a bit of a dog when you have lots of photos (which you inevitably do, because it costs next to nothing to take as many as you want with a digicam). So they've apparently speeded it up, though it remains to be seen whether they've speeded it up on my computer in my house.

Then there's GarageBand, a music sequencer upon which Apple have worked their interface magicks. It doesn't matter that you've been able to get cheap/free music software since the year dot. What matters is that Apple have made it useable. With the notable exception of pro tools (which is not cheap, unless you count the old free version which doesn't work with OS X), music software is universally hard to use.

It either assumes you're entirely familiar with traditional music technology (like mixers, equalisers, compressors, etc), or it assumes you know one end of a MIDI lead from another and comprehend esoterica like velocity, duration, piano roll editors, quantising, groove quantising, and sound modules.

The genius of Apple is that they're able to get, from a group of programmers who have no conception of someone who doesn't understand that "basic" stuff (Emagic's software has a notoriously steep learning curve), a nice looking, user friendly, piece of software that anyone will be able to use inside 15 minutes.

They did it with iMovie, which I think is The Best Software Of All Time. They embarrassed digital camera manufacturers by pissing all over photo management/ basic editing packages. And, famously, revealed that the vendors of DVD authoring software (in Macworld writer David Fanning's words), were "having a laugh at our expense."

Sure, it'll still be an occasional nightmare getting all the 3rd party peripherals like keyboards and interfaces plugged in and working reliably... and it will open up a new world of pain in tech support, but wait and see: there are an awful lot of people in the world who can play a musical instrument but haven't (yet) thought about using their home computer for multitrack recording.