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Jobs' two hour presentation could be boiled down to the following announcements: 'New mouse and keyboard, Power Macs same price and a bit faster (built-in gigabit Ethernet, and multiprocessors), Mac OS X still not ready, iMacs cheaper and in new colours, much improved iMovie, games coming to the Mac, and a cool new Cube thing.'

But Apple is no ordinary company and Macworld is no ordinary computer show. Jobs' address is as much a gospel revival show as anything, designed to re-infuse the already converted with renewed faith, as much as detail dry technical advances.

However, Jobs' focus on colours and design aesthetics may well have been as much down to necessity as any predilection on the part of Jobs, whose enthusiasm for cool-looking stuff like the newly launched G4 Cube is undoubtedly genuine.

The best parts of Jobs' speech were the new mouse and keyboard, and Jobs' frank acknowledgement that Apple's customers hated the round mouse and cramped iMac-styled keyboard. The price cuts and modest speed bumps on the iMac were welcome, but the ageing range is, essentially, unchanged. The same small 15in screen (at a time when 17in screens are becoming the industry norm for the consumer market), and the failure to add any new features like a CD-RW drive, or even FireWire to the lower end models, suggests the iMac's shelf life is limited. The price cutting, while welcome, is something that you do towards the end of a product's life cycle.

Those fancy new colours may be attractive, but they have already provoked anguished reactions from third-party peripheral manufacturers who have spent a lot of time and resources matching their scanners/printers/external drives to the iMac's existing colour schemes. If Apple puts a premium on colour and design, then it ought to work closely with third-parties so they know in advance which colours are coming and even

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get help in matching them. Apple does neither. So spare a thought for the disgruntled folks with warehouses full of unsold peripherals in the old iMac colours.

The Power Mac announcements were a mixed bag too. The introduction of a gigabit Ethernet will be welcomed by Apple's key graphics market, enabling as it does the rapid movement of large files over networks.

The announcement of multiprocessor Power Mac G4s was forced upon Apple by the inability of Motorola to produce faster G4 processors. The multiprocessor machines only make sense when Mac OS X arrives. A dual processor Power Mac G4 is not twice as fast as a single processor Power Mac G4 when the machines are running Mac OS 9.

During his keynote Jobs had the spin button set at maximum: he demonstrated a dual 500MHz Power Mac G4 trashing a 1GHz Pentium III-based PC running Photoshop. He neglected, of course, to mention the fact that, unlike the vast majority of Mac applications, Photoshop is one of very few to have a specially written multiprocessing extension. Try the same comparison at home with another program and the Power Mac G4 will not fare so well.

Another disappointment was the failure to announce a successor to the ATI Rage 128 Pro 3D graphics accelerator system that ships with all Macs. Jobs brought Bungie founder Alex Seropian on stage to announce that his company intends to port all its games to the Mac (even thought it has been taken over by Microsoft) which was clearly a welcome boost to Apple's campaign to make the Mac a serious gaming machine. Cue, the announcement of a new cutting-edge 3D graphics system for the Mac, thought everyone watching the speech. Then nothing.

The word at Macworld Expo was that ATI did not have a Mac driver ready for its new ATI Radeon 256 card. But only days before the company had pre-announced that it would be making a major product launch at the Expo. The total lack of any mention of 3D graphics hardware was surprising to say the least. And there was still no upgrade from the AGP 2 to the much faster AGP 4 video bus which is rapidly becoming the new PC standard. Something has clearly gone wrong here.

Instead Jobs used the launch of the impressively engineered G4 Cube to end his address with the now traditional 'wow' factor. It is lovely to look at, a marvel of miniaturisation, but lacks expandability and has nothing new inside. A triumph of form over content. The ultimate spin machine.