As you no doubt heard, Apple today refreshed their MacBook lineup with across-the-board adjustments to pricing. I’ll let other sites comment on the news more generally, as this is a music site, not a notebook site. But the big news for audio in terms of I/O, just so you don’t miss that:

• FireWire on more models: Finally, you can again get a 13” MacBook (now called MacBook Pro) with onboard FireWire – a FW800 connector. That’ll restore the use of audio interfaces and certain high-speed storage, and means the MacBook is again a good choice as an audio machine at the US$1199 base price point.
• ExpressCard on fewer models: Oddly, the addition of a lowly SD card slot (nice for photography and mobile recorders) has supplanted the ExpressCard slot on the 15” MacBook Pro. If you want ExpressCard, you have to buy the 17” – which, in turn, loses the SD card slot.

Now, generally the news here is pretty good. For music, you probably aren’t too concerned about the GPU, so the 15” MacBook Pro at US$1699 is looking like a nice deal. But PC users are no doubt puzzled, given that all of these connections are standard equipment on the vast majority of PC notebooks, including ones that cost less than a grand. And there still aren’t as many USB ports as you’d like – you get two ports on all but the 17” model, which has three, and very often only one of those may actually be usable because of power issues.

MacBook Pro [Apple]

The battery life is also greatly improved, but unfortunately is no longer user-upgradeable. See further comments on CDMotion.

For those of you who are interested, Apple’s WWDC keynote has focused today on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone SDK. Macworld has a nice live blow-by-blow.

Here’s the bottom line for me. First, Apple has done an incredible job of demonstrating the potential of rich media apps in general, mobile and otherwise. They’ve showed off a powerful set of third-party applications that go beyond what most people think of on phones, including rich 3D, positional 3D audio (via OpenAL), and music apps. And it’s nice to see those rich media apps alongside things like push messaging. We’re seeing phones as mobile creative devices and not just as phones or even game systems. Music apps in particular prove to be massive hits with mainstream audiences, not just “pro audio” audiences. See our round-up of iPhone/iPod Touch music apps for a glimpse of what this can look like. Band, a set of software instruments, made an officially-sanctioned appearance right in the keynote to widespread cheers from a non-musician audience. And the fact that it’s official means you’ll get great new apps even without hacking your iPhone in the near future, as we hoped.

And this is, of course, what musicians and live visualists have been saying since the iPhone’s release: third-party software development, far beyond what Apple alone can imagine, is what really makes mobile devices interesting. Here on CDM, we’ve seen novel applications like VJs running live visuals in clubs and Pro Tools controllers, among other things, and now a lot of that is likely to become official. And given music apps for Nintendo portable game consoles and Palm and Windows Mobile PDAs, this should be no surprise. But what is a surprise, perhaps, is that mainstream audiences are excited about these things as we are.

We also now know the iPhone 3G will be US$199 and available in more countries, which means volume is likely to increase fast.

I don’t need to hype up the iPhone, though — I expect you’ve got the whole blogosphere for that. But platforms are about tradeoffs; there’s no such thing as a perfect platform. And with all the iPhone lust, we seem to be missing some of the downsides of Apple’s approach:

Apple made a controversial announcement at the World Wide Developers’ Conference, which went something like this: “We’ve got a new, innovative way of giving you developer access to our phone: we’re not.” (I’m paraphrasing; see the full quote below.) In less than 24 hours, this has devolved into an online debate between defensive “traditional” developers and Web developers, Apple critics and apologists. Many have tried to turn it into a debate over what whether or not web apps are applications. That’s silly. Of course web applications are apps. Here’s the real problem in a nutshell:

1. Apple is ignoring what makes non-Web apps valuable. That’s their choice — it’s their phone — and we could forgive them and maybe even agree with them, except –

2. They’re then trying to distort reality around them so that things they’re saying that happen to be wrong wind up being right. Lots of companies do that, but this being Apple, some people are actually listening, and I hope they’ll stop.

I’m going to say this the long way around, because I type fast and think in sprawling, high-word-count ways. Our friends at Rogue Amoeba, one of our favorite audio developers for the Mac (notice how multimedia keeps coming up), put this more succinctly:

Web Apps Are Not Applications

We know that making SDKs is not easy, and so it boggles the mind that you were able to create a complete iPhone SDK so quickly! So much access, provided so seamlessly – it is really quite amazing.

With this new SDK, we can create something neither of us could possibly have done alone, and make the iPhone platform the mobile platform to develop for.

Anxiously awaiting his copy of the iPhone SDK,
Sarcastic Developer

Web apps are wonderful. I spend huge amounts of time in them. But as musicians, you know why web apps alone aren’t enough. Hardware access and multimedia capabilities are vitally important for some (but not all) tasks. Take them away, and your expensive computers become instantly less useful. This matters to some more than others, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. In fact, try this experiment: take your Mac. Remove all audio and MIDI device support, allowing only iPhone and the OS to make sound. Now you can’t even record a voice memo or phone call — no mic input. Next, reinstall your browser, removing Java and Flash. (Good: I can read Penny Arcade and CDM — well, most of CDM. Bad: I can’t watch Homestar Runner. Or YouTube. Or use embedded Flickr apps. Or use entire websites. Uh-oh.)

A phone is not a Mac, and that’s a good thing. But to assume these two things equate just doesn’t make sense. Design is about compromises, and that’s a good thing. But now design is about making compromises, then changing the reality around you so that they’re not compromises any more?

Here’s a short list of other things an iPhone web app can’t do that (with the notable exception of multi-touch) the vast majority of phones can — yes, including that crappy low-end Nokia you got free with service. Really. Look up the developer site for your phone, and check it out.

In a little while, Steve Jobs will be keynoting Apple’s developer conference. I doubt that anyone will be thinking about audio drivers. So in the remaining moments to do that, let’s go — because 10.5 looks like it’s yet another release from Apple that takes music production seriously.

Most of us didn’t expect any major improvements in Apple’s Core Audio in 10.5 — nor need them, as Core Audio is rock-solid for most of what we need to do, in terms of performance and reliability. That’s not to give Apple a free pass; there have been some compatibility issues with point releases (10.4.9 comes to mind), bumps in the AU plug-in format’s evolution, and so on. But at the end of the day, the Mac is an OS that works for music production, more seamlessly and easily than anything else out there. Yet Apple is in fact making some improvements to its audio driver system even in 10.5:

164 Professional Audio Input and Output with Leopard Mac OS X Essentials Presentation
Discover Leopard’s support for the recently-approved USB Audio Device 2.0 class specification and how to write spec-compliant descriptors for your high-speed USB audio device. Find out how to unleash the power of FireWire peer-to-peer networking using Leopard’s all-new FireWire audio drivers and enhanced Audio/Video Control (AV/C) media services. Learn how to implement user interfaces and vendor-specific AV/C commands to control your audio device.

So, wow, in other words … in a release that’s largely focused on Core Animation and the visual side of the operating system, Apple has added new FireWire support, networking over FireWire, and driver-free USB 2.0 support. (Right now, you can plug-and-play class-compliant USB 1.1 audio devices, but not USB 2.0. Erm … or whatever those two USB specs are really supposed to be called; that’s another discussion.)

Live from the WWDC keynote with CDM’s own Lee Sherman, Apple has the latest on their new operating system release:

1. OS X is 64-bit, top to bottom: Here’s a real demonstration of the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Windows XP x64 has been a mess; virtually no one has adopted it (despite some advocacy on the part of music developer Cakewalk), and a lot of software isn’t compatible (like, notably, any music software that relies on PACE, as well as many drivers). Now Apple will make OS X 10.5 entirely 64-bit, with seamless compatibility for 32-bit apps. Hopefully that includes Core Audio; we’ll be asking more about the details on this.
2. Automatic backup: Time Machine provides automated backup of everything you do, answering a real need as Apple has found only 26% of users polled are backing up. (I’m guessing 75% of them were lying, too.) Restore everything or some things, locally on a hard drive or on a server. It even works with applications like iPhoto. It’ll be interesting to learn more details on this; this is a feature I’ve wanted Apple to add for years.
3. Time Lord: [Demonstrating the new Time Machine UI] “Time is a dimension that recedes into your desktop,” says Lee, a la Expose. A timeline on the right side flips through earlier iterations of a folder in Finder. This is a key point, because one of the oft-overlooked needs for backup is undoing human/user error, not just recovering from a drive failure. Everything works right within the Finder. “Best backup UI ever,” says Lee.
4. New Software Bundle: Leopard will now come right out of the box with Boot Camp (for Intel Macs booting Windows), Front Row (the multimedia app), and the fun photo app Photo Booth, plus, a new app –