Your post makes precisely my point about online reviews and the App Store reviews. - And this is, after all, what we're discussing here.
Vagueness. What do you mean by share? Between who? Users on the same machine? Easy and reliable. Users on different machines on a wired network? Easy and reliable. Users on different machines on a wireless library? Possible but not reliable. Over the internet? In the cloud? Not possible. Multiple simultaneous access? Impossible. (There are server apps that will do that, they begin around the $200 mark. iPhoto is a $15 app.) My point? Read through these forums. All of those scenarios have turned up here under the heading 'sharing the library'.
So, when someone complains that iPhoto 'can't share the library' without contextualising what they mean by sharing then that reduces the usefulness of the review.
Then there's the whole issue of 'I don't like this app because it's not a different app entirely'. Your comments about the TC illustrate this. You appear to have no problem with a TC except that it is not a Media Server? Sorry but that makes as much sense as complaining that your car is a very poor boat and it would not be a huge engineering feat to get it to function as one as well. The point is that your car is designed to do a job and complaining that it doesn't do some other job is not to review the device in front of you. To want an Apple made Media Server is perfectly legitimate. But to deride the TC simply because it's not a Media Server is not to review the actual device and how it fulfills (or not) the role it's designed for. How many of the one star reviews on the App Store come under that category?
Another poster on this thread says he'll hasn't updated to iPhoto 11 and never will. Why? Because of some vague and unspecificied issues with Apple since Steve Jobs died - even thought iPhoto 11 predates that event. So he's rejecting an app he's not used because... well whatever reason it's got nothing to do with iPhoto 11 itself, or if it has we have no way of knowing.
And remember, iPhoto (nor any app) is not designed to do all things in the whole world that you might want to do in any circumstance. It's a $15 app. It's nothing like as capable an editor as Photoshop ($500+, depending on the version), or even Aperture ($70) or Lightroom ($150). It's designed to be a photo database for a single user, very much someone with a point and shoot or a phone, who want to tidy up the shots a little and send them to Grandma or to Facebook and so on. It will do more, but that is the market segment that it is squarely aimed at and optimised for.
And that's the issue with these store reviews. All of these folks may have valid issues with iPhoto 11, but unless they take the time to explain what these issues are, or the usage scenarios they envisage, then the reviews have to be taken with a pinch of salt.
As for the design of the newest iMac I would have thought that the internet has plenty on why the optical drive was removed - and it wasn't to 'save space'. Apple believes that Optical Media is going the way of the floppy disk and that the usage no longer warrants having such a drive built-in. So, just like they did with the floppy, they remove the built-in drive and say if you still want that functionality use an external. I personally have zero problems with this. In my household of four, including two teenagers, we haven't used an Optical Disk for anything in a couple of years. We do have quite a few little USB flash drives that bring things back and forward from school and so on, and we have reasonable quality broadband for the where we live, but it's by no means the best available at other places in my country.
I will happily agree that the placing of the SD slot at the back is not helpful, but the absence of the optical slot does mean somene in this house won't be putting the card into the wrong slot for the third time... but that's not an intended benefit đ
Just like iPhoto is not designed for all usage scenarios, everywhere, neither is the iMac. If your usage scenario demands a built-in optical reader then the iMac is not the machine for you. Just like if you have to transport 4 kids, wife, wife's mother and two dogs, then that two-seater convertible is not the car for you.
My point about who you're asking is simple. I'll happily opine on the merits or otherwise of Apple's products, but I do so with no fear. I don't work for Apple, don't have shares in Apple nor have any connection with the company at all. However, if I was a retail clerk in a store I'd be somewhat more circumspect before voicing criticisms - and also, do you think Apple brief every sales clerk on the reasoning behind every decision? Do Ford? BMW? HP? MicroSoft?
As for 1080p AVCHD I do believe that iMovie will ingest and work with this material, but I'm not any expert on it. IIRC it does it by transcoding it to a higher quality codec for editing. I wouldn't be sure that that Adobe, with more than 10K employees, qualifies as a plucky start up. It may not have the same R&D budget as Apple, but it applies that to a much narrower range of products.
