Back to the Mac with a vengeance

This week Apple introduced the new Macbook Air in an event which was very appropriately announced as “Back to the Mac”.  While the new Air is probably a harbinger of new things to come throughout the Mac line, it was in the software, usability and business aspects that things got really interesting.

While I have been away from writing about the Mac for well over a month I couldn’t let all these new developments go by without calling attention to how they will probably affect Apple’s Mac business.

Apple’s new iLife’11 applications are pretty impressive and as always the price tag is hardly likely to make real users even think once before ordering the update.  At $49 iLife’11 is a great value as the applications empower regular users to achieve almost professional results with little effort.

To me the most interesting aspects of the event were not iLife’11 or the Macbook Air however.  The major star of the show was the Mac App Store.  Why? Because it will change how a lot of people perceive the Mac.  iPhone, iPad and iPod users who are used to the ease with which they discover, buy and install new applications will see that they can have the same simplicity in a Mac.  This ought to go a long way towards convincing some of these iOS device users to become Mac users.

When OS X Lion is released, it will make the Mac even more attractive to iOS device owners as the new interface elements that have been added to the next release of the operating system were all drawn directly from iOS.   If Apple moves to provide the same instant-on capability the Macbook Air has to all its notebooks, it help to draw in even more iOS device owners who are used to convenience it provides on those devices.

This could be achieved through the outright replacement of the hard drives by flash storage or by the addition of a smaller flash storage for use by the operating system for the instant on operation, while retaining a regular hard drive to provide larger capacity storage.

All indications are that 2011 will be a very strong year for the Mac, as the number of FaceTime devices in wild grows rapidly and thus the appeal of being able to hold a visual conversation with them grows as well.  Apple sold over 21 million iOS devices last quarter.  When the iPad is updated and starts to support FaceTime as well, it will start adding to the number of iOS devices which care capable of placing and receiving video calls.

While a FaceTime client for Windows isn’t available, the Mac will be a bit more enticing to those who become frequent users of this type of communication.  I’ve seen the first indications of this from a couple of friends who have began using this feature in iPhone 4 and are now looking at the Mac in a new light due to the possibility of making these calls from a notebook as well.

With all the success of the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Appled a lot of effort onto iOS over the past year.  This lead many to speculate that Apple might be loosing interest in its traditional Mac product line.  I believe the new Mac App Store, OS X Lion, iLife’11 and the new Macbook Air go a long way to show that Apple is far from moving away from a market in which it has been growing faster than all competitors for the past eighteen quarters.