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For people who use Macs the year seems to be punctuated with the Macworld shows that are spread out around the world. They are generally the places where new stuff gets introduced and where Steve Jobs gives his keynote speeches. This time in New York the iPod line was revised (maybe I’ll replace my Palm Pilot with an iPod), a new 17-inch wider screen G4 iMac was introduced, iTunes 3 was announced and released, OS X 10.2 was officially announced, and iTools was changed to .Mac. I love iTunes and iTunes 3 adds “Smart Playlists” which are rule-based playlists that are generated from the music that you have in your library or the music that you listen to. If you have an iPod it can let you listen to the music that you like to listen to more or it can also let you collect your favourite songs into a playlist for a compilation CD for driving in the car. .Mac adds some neat stuff like iCal for scheduling and Backup for…backing up files, but the controversial aspect is that unlike the late iTools, .Mac costs US$99 a year (with former iTools users given a US$50 break on the first year). I like the new features, but I don’t know if it is worth US$99 a year… and there is a lot of anger about it too out there. OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) is also going to cost more money (US$129) and that’s controversial as well. Many neat new features, but will people spend the money to have a few more features? It will be interesting to see how Apple responds to it.