Steve Jobs’s Keynote has now come and gone and I am left wanting more. I admit I bought into the hype and was monitoring the keynote on my new HTC Touch during lectures this morning.
For those of you who missed all the excitement in San Francisco this morning, Steve Jobs released a few new products in his annual keynote at Macworld. These products include new software for the iPhone, iTunes movie rentals, a new network backup device called Time Capsule, and a new notebook: the Macbook Air.
I am not impressed with Time Capsule. This is a niche where Apple shouldn’t have the monopoly. $500 for essentially a 1TB network drive is ridiculous. A network capable hard drive enclosure can be purchased for about $50. I am mad at Apple for not letting Time Machine back up to standard network drives. This might have changed now, but the details of the changes to Time Machine haven’t surfaced yet. I am sure that the release of Time Capsule will make Time Machine much easier to hack; however, standard network drive support is something that should work out of the box with Time Machine.
The new Macbook Air is a nice piece of eye candy, but I can never see myself owning one. The ‘thin factor’ is overrated. Compared to a standard MacBook, the Air has the same footprint, which is much more important that thickness. I don’t see the advantage of a lightweight, thin and slow MacBook that costs more. Apple should have designed a notebook similar to the Asus Eee PC, instead of modifying a MacBook.
Personally, I am not a big movie watcher, so the new movie rentals don’t mean much to me. Even if I was into movies, rentals are not yet available in Canada. On that note, the iPhone’s Canadian availability didn’t get announced either.
The product that I was hoping would be announced, an affordable mac tower (which I have talked about previously), wasn’t mentioned. I still think there is hope for a product like this, and I do believe that there is a market for one as well. There are a huge number of people who use dual monitors, but won’t shell out the cash for a Mac Pro, which are overkill for most people anyways.
…..365 days till the next one…….
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4 Comments on this post
Leave a CommentAn affordable Mac tower would be great. I used to run Mac and loved it, except if would not run my CAD software at the time.
Now a days I keep hearing the Windows runs better on Macs than PCs. If the price of Mac hardware was comparable I would definitely switch back to a Mac.
Comment left on 1.15.2008 by Ben
I took one look at the Macbook Air (after shuddering at the blatant homosexuality of a name like “Air”) and quickly realized that the battery was static. Why in the name of god would you make a notebook without the ability to change the battery? Don’t get me wrong, my iMac is the single greatest piece of electronics that I own, but Steve needs to get a clue.
Comment left on 1.18.2008 by John
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Comment left on 11.12.2008 by Rosario Ewing
If you need to run CAD on your Mac you should check out parallels new desktop for Mac 4.0. Runs AutoCAD or progeCAD like a native mac program. You get the best of both worlds…
Comment left on 11.23.2008 by AutoCAD for Mac