MacWorld 2008 thoughts
Well, the internet has once again been crushed under the mass of Apple fans waiting to listen to Steve Jobs’ latest pronouncements. I think the fans should ask for their money back, frankly.
Steve started off talking about Time Capsule, an appliance to consolidate all of your Macs backups in one 500GB or 1TB box. Here’s a case of Apple being beat to the punch by Microsoft with Windows Home Server. Problem is, Windows Home Server does more…media sharing, efficient backups by scanning sectors instead of files, and data redundancy. All of this in a user-configurable box. If you need more hard drive space, just toss in a new drive. None of this is in the Time Capsule. If the Time Capsule backups are as efficient as Time Machine, you’ll need one Capsule per iMac. This is the dud of MacWorld 2008, and is probably this year’s Apple TV.
Speaking of Apple TV, now we can rent movies…something Steve dismisses in his introduction! Nice. The rental system is $3 for catalog titles, $4 for new releases, and add $1 for HD quality. HD quality is undefined…it’s probably 720p with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound. Anything else would be prohibitively large. It streams quickly, and is purchasable from iTunes, the iPhone/iPod touch, and Apple TV. The Apple TV is also getting a software update called Take 2 (how appropriate) and a price drop to $229/329 for the 40/160GB models. That puts it closer to the sweet deal mark, but it’s about $30 too much. If it was an upscaling DVD player, $229 would be a steal. For the old price of $299, a blu-ray drive would make this a must purchase for anyone in the market.
We also have an update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, which is the video Gearlive leaked out a while ago. It’s exactly what they show, so it’s not really news. The real news was that Apple is adding Mail, Weather, Stocks, Maps, and Notes which catches it up to the iPhone app suite. All of this will be free for future iPod Touch owners, but current owners need to cough up $20. I smell a rebate coming.
Finally, we have the Macbook Air, and no it’s not a new pair of sneakers. It’s the world’s thinnest laptop (until the next one). You have an ultraportable with a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo ULV chip, 2GB RAM, 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, and 80GB drive for $1800. For only $1300 more, you can get a 64GB SSD and 1.8Ghz processor. This is horrifically overpriced, even for Apple. For $200 more I can get a bigger screen, a faster processor, and a hard drive that is both larger and faster. This should be priced closer to the Macbook because thats the target market: people who like the macbook but want something more portable. The Macbook Pro market wants a desktop replacement, and this will not suffice.
I don’t think anyone could have seriously predicted this MacWorld would top last year’s iPhone announcement, but this was a disappointment for anyone hoping Apple would continue their momentum from 2007’s launch of the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Leopard. I think Apple’s announcement saying only 20% of their customers have moved up to Leopard is telling. Leopard has a lot of technical hurdles left to overcome before it can become as rock-solid as Tiger. I think 2008 will be the same…there’s some hurdles that need to be jumped with these new products before anyone can look back fondly on MacWorld 2008.
January 15, 2008 at 6:28 pm
[...] calling it now – Time Capsule will be 2008’s Apple TV. I’m not the only one to reach this conclusion. The device itself is neat, but really it’s just a backup machine with wireless capabilities. [...]