• New MacBook Pro 15″ – improved display, improved battery life, processor speed increases, SD Card reader now included, entry level price dropped to $1,699.
• Enhancements to MacBook Pro 17″ – entry level product now has 2.8 GHz processor and 500GB Hard drive, entry level price dropped to $2,499.
• MacBook 13″ Aluminum is now MacBook Pro 13″ – tops out at 8GB RAM and 500GB Hard drive just like 15″ big brother, entry level price drops to $1,199.
• MacBook Air – entry level price drops to $1,499, processor clock speeds bumped up to 1.6 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 2.13 GHz.
• Safari 4 is out of beta. (It is super fast BTW).
• Snow Leopard to ship in September – $29 upgrade for existing Leopard users, $49 family pack available too.
• iPhone 3G S – launches on June 19, 2009 in North America and parts of Europe, the S stands for Speed, will ship with iPhone OS 3.0 (which is available on June 17, 2009), includes Video Recording/Edtiting, Voice Control, 3 megapixel camera with auto-focus. Available in 16GB or 32 GB option at $199 and $299 respectively. iPhone 3G 8GB option continues to be available and price is reduced to $99.
• iPhone OS 3.0 – available on June 17, 2009, free to iPhone owners, $9.99 for iPod touch owners, over 100 new features including cut, copy, paste, and spotlight search.

I didn’t think so.

As of June 2, the One to One membership will only be offered to customers who purchase Macs through Apple’s direct channels – our retail stores and the Apple online store. The price for the program will remain $99. Existing customers will be able to renew for one additional year for the same price as well.

What is it that’s driving Apple to tighten these guidelines? Is the program becoming too popular? Is this part of Apple’s strategy to drive more sales through their direct channels?

I’ve heard from various sources within the Apple retail channel that the program’s popularity has begun to grow exponentially. In fact, Apple had to re-word their verbiage about six months ago to reflect and communicate that one-to-one was subject to availability of time slots, according to one source.

What do you think?

One of the many blogs I follow is Church Video Ideas, published by Greg Atkinson, Technical Arts Director for Bent Tree Bible Fellowship in Carrollton, TX. As an “Extra” in today’s blog entry, Greg mentioned that Bent Tree recently released a new Worship CD. Being that I’m a musician and enjoy writing, collaborating, and playing music both in and outside of church I knew I wanted to check it out.

Here are a few observations I made that I think will really help them get traction on this:

1. Once you land on the CD page a song starts playing almost immediately. As I clicked to listen to some of the other songs, they started playing even faster. This means that they have probably allocated plenty of bandwidth to streaming these songs. As well, they have formatted their songs in a manner that balances quality with web friendliness. Many churches want to promote their music in similar fashion but don’t allocate enough bandwidth to get the songs to load and play fast enough. Or,they don’t format the music for playback via the internet. Most listeners judge new music within the first few seconds and if they have to wait more than a few seconds to start that judgement they just move on to other music. Bent Tree did a really good job in this aspect.

2. There are several original songs on this project. It is very refreshing to see that they are offering, at no cost, copies of the lead sheets including lyrics and chords. There are links to three or four I think. WORSHIP LEADERS AND DIRECTORS NOW HEAR THIS: If you write and record original music, copyright it, get a CCLI account, and then follow the lead of Bent Tree and post the lead sheets for others to download for free. You want other churches to play your songs, right? Make it easy for them to do so. If you don’t know how to do this, ping us, and let us teach you how.

3. Clicking a link on the page opens up a new browser window. This is smart, in that, if you have one of the songs playing and click, say, the “Purchase CD” link that song doesn’t stop playing. Many websites, whether church or non-church related make this mistake. To me, this shows that Bent Tree has a good frame of reference on the importance of a quality user experience. Think about it, how many times have you been listening to audio on a website, clicked on a link you wanted to check out and then lost connection with the audio? The bottom line is they didn’t just quickly throw together a web page to try and sell some CD’s, they approached the creation from a user’s perspective and thus ensured a quality user experience.

The new CD from Bent Tree is $10. I don’t know if it will be available on iTunes but we highly recommend that every music producer, including churches, get their music on iTunes. Again, if you need help with this aspect, ping us, and let us teach you how.

Great job Bent Tree. (You too, Greg).