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…….
I have an image of an ultimate computer setup in my head. The big problem with it is that it cannot be purchased (for a reasonable price).
This computer would be an Apple box that powers three monitors. Two of the monitors would run OS X and the third would run Windows via VMWare. A Mac Pro is capable of this setup, but as I have mentioned earlier, they are ridiculously expensive and not affordable for a student. There is a huge gap in the Apple product line between the Mac Pro and the iMac. In this gap, there should be a uATX desktop computer. Pixel Perfect Productions has mentioned this exact ‘Missing Mac‘ that I am talking about.
I think that my only present option is to build a Hackintosh like Lifehacker did here. Let’s hope that Macworld ’08 will change this.
Rogers Wireless has officially released the iPhone in Canada before Christmas. It will be available Dec. 17th. No details on pricing. Good thing I didn’t go out and buy an HTC Touch. Here is the release poster.
Just a quick note. My favorite media player, VLC, has just released a version for 10.5. The VLC player was very buggy with Leopard and was pretty much unusable. This was one of several gripes with Leopard for me. Leopard is one step closer to being fully functional.
Go and download it Here.
I was playing around on the apple store today and started configuring a Mac Pro. The price started to escalate quickly, so I decided to see how high I could get the price. Here are the specs of the most ridiculously gorgeous and expensive mac money can buy.
Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
16 GB RAM
Mac Pro RAID card
4 x 750GM 7200-rpm Hard Drives = 3TB of storage
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB Video Card
2 x 30″ Apple Cinema Displays
2 x Superdrives
Bluetooth and WiFi
Wireless Keyboard and Mouse
+ several software packages and AppleCare
Total Price: $20,817.00
But seriously, if anybody would like to donate, please to not hesitate to get in touch with me.
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