Review by ConsumerAdvocate (dakotad555) at (gmail) dot (com)

I bought this for one reason and one reason only: the hope that iMovie had been fixed from the 2008 version to be more like the 2006 version. Didn’t happen. iMovie is now worse than ever. Editing audio files is probably the most frustrating thing I’ve tried in a while. The interface is not designed well, and I found myself looking for features that used to be there (fade out video effect in conjunction with audio fade out) thinking they’ve got got to be there somewhere, and then finding out that they simply don’t exist.

IMPORTANT: If you install iMovie 09, it will make your existing install of iMovie HD UNUSABLE. You CANNOT keep your old installation of iMovie 06HD when you install iMovie 09! This is amazingly frustrating, especially sine iMovie 09 will not open iMovie 06 video files!nnI honestly think they don’t want to make iMovie 09 work the way it should to force people to buy the much more expensive Final Cut, even if you don’t need all of the features of a full video editing software. Working with HD video in iMovie is a joke; it lags, stutters, and crashes for no apparent reason.

iPhoto is fine, but the new features are not that impressive. The face recognition would be awesome if it worked well, but it doesn’t. It wanted to group my grandmother and my sister together (I guess there is a little family resemblance there). The GPS feature is awesome if you have a GPS enabled camera, but if you have a camera that nice you’re probably using a proffesional image editing software. Eventually (next 2-3 years) as consumer cameras start to have built in GPS, this feature will be valuable, so I guess you could say iPhoto is ahead of its time.

Garage Band works like it should, but there aren’t any improvements that make it worth upgrading. The much flaunted lessons must be bought and downloaded, they don’t come with the software. It is useful certainly, but I just don’t see anything that makes me believe upgrading is worth it.

Frankly, this is just another ho-hum release. You don’t need to upgrade unless you just have to have GPS photo tracking or face recognition software. If you were hoping (like me) that iMovie would be more robust, think again. It would have been very easy for Apple to include two versions of iMovie: advanced and basic. Basic would be the default setting and advanced would include the features lost from the 06 version. It could be turned on or off for the best of both worlds. Instead I have iMovie HD installed on top of iLife 09. Waste of hard drive space.

iLife 09 doesn’t offer any compelling reason to update if you have iLife 08. There aren’t any improvement that are not relatively minor or obscure (face recognition for example). And there is one MASSIVE disadvatage, at least for those who prefer iMovie 06: installing iMovie 09 will cause iMovie 06 to become inoperable! You have no choice in the matter, and no prompt lets you know that you are losing iMovie HD by installing iLife 09. It just happens.

Why Apple doesn’t allow the user to control how many or few features are available is beyond me. I’m not saying everyone should want all the features from iMovie 06, but for those of us that do, why not make them available? This sort of ‘one size fits all’ approach is really frustrating.