Macworld 2008
So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it1 by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it’s floating. Of course, there’s a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren’t as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it’s gorgeous, I don’t want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can’t justify a need for it.
I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant — one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I’d only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don’t currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.
I’m also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It’s also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you’ve got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you’re a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I’ve ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.
If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.
1 OK, I know it’s not literally weightless — 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it’s pretty light. ↑
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The gimmickry and geekery passes me by, but as a designer I find it interesting that it's the first lap-top I've seen which is thicker at the back than the front when seen in profile. Another of Apple's triumphs of style over content perhaps. What's the point if you have to lug an external drive round with you?
by Jonathan Briggs @ 18/01/2008 12:02 am • Permalink •
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Jonathan Briggs: I believe many of the smaller Vaios have a similar profile (thicker at the back than the front). Tapering towards the front does give the illusion that the laptops is thinner than it really is. I disagree about the external drive: I don't think you need to lug one round at all. These days, i only ever use my optical drive to install software (and most software comes as a download, so it's just the system, iWork/iLife, Microsoft Office and Adobe products). They designed a very cunning 'Remote Drive' feature, which lets you borrow the optical drive of any machine on the local network, which reportedly works very well. I think dropping the optical drive is a good compromise.
by bsag @ 18/01/2008 8:46 am • Permalink •
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bsag, I'm about to head to SF to go to MacWorld in an hour or two -- thanks for the TimeCapsule nod, I'll have a good look at that. (I always find the whole place pretty overwhelming and find it helpful to have about three or four quests before exhaustion and overstimulation hit.)
by Pica @ 18/01/2008 12:01 pm • Permalink •
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I have been following the discussions about the new film rental system. The 24 hour limit is a bit of a draw back. I have often started to watch a DVD only to realise I was not really in the mood, then come back to it a few days later and really enjoy it.
It would be great if they could work out how to create a download version of loveFILM where you could keep a film as long as you like, but only have one film at a time. I can see that this would be technically hard to achieve but I am sure apple could get it to work if they tried.
by devoid @ 18/01/2008 12:21 pm • Permalink •
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I want to like the MacAir, but I think it's a bit too little too late in light of the absolutely stunning ASUS "EEE".
Let me be clear, the EEE can't run iPhoto or TextMate or anything that I love my Mac for....but i mean the thing is tiny and only $400! In pounds that's like 15 American lira. And it's RUGGED. People drop EEE's ( which are all solid-state and don't require a $999 tax! ) all the time and are amazed that the box just keeps on.
I don't feel the loss of the CD drives, but I think that the whole "take your old computer and use it as network disc" is exceedingly lame. I should think they should say "attach your drive to your TimeCapsule!" -- that's what someone who loves profit would do.
Further, a new laptop so what? Give me multitouch screens, make the screen rotatble like a tablet and then you're adding something new to the product line. As far as I can tell, MacAir hits the sour spot between the MacBook and the MBP: the worst of both world.
Hey and speaking of TimeCapsule, bsag, you hit the idea right, but are thinking old school. Your discs are too full for comfort, but who, honestly, wants to have to handle a NAS system. WTH isn't .Mac beefy enough to give you a GoogeLoad of data so that you can have off-site, maintained storage?
I get the feeling that the Apple left hands don't know what the Apple right hands are doing, they need a clear strategy on how their ecosystem of products work and / or scale to meet your needs i.e. "You start with product X, if you have more than 30G, you might want to go to our product Y, for larger needs take the custom Z plan, it may be pricier, but it meets all the most-demanding requirements".
by Steven G. Harms @ 18/01/2008 4:27 pm • Permalink •
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Pica: Lucky you! Let me know if you found out any juicy tidbits.
devoid: Quite a few people think the 24 hour limit is too short. I can see the point, but I don't think its anything I've ever experienced. In fact, being able to download a movie on the spur of the moment (when I know I'm in the mood for it) would be a vast improvement on the LoveFILM situation.
Steven G. Harms: Interesting argument, but I'm not at all sure that there is much overlap between a potential Asus EEE market and the market for the Air. I, too, love the idea of the EEE, but the thing that would make it a toy rather than a tool for me would be the very fact that it doesn't run Mac OS X. I've tried to work in a Linux/Mac mixed ecosystem before, and while it worked (just), it was constantly a little bit irritating. I'm much more efficient now that I have a very consistent, all-Mac setup. So even the $400 would be expensive in that context. In short, I don't think that the EEE and the Air are going to be poaching many sales from one another.
On the backup issue, I absolutely agree that .Mac is a serious under-performer at this point. At every keynote, I keep expecting Steve to make an announcement about it that turns the ugly caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. So far that hasn't happened. But... Even if Apple beefed up .Mac and allowed you to backup via TimeMachine to your .Mac, I'd still want a Time Capsule. Why? Time and bandwidth. I have a 20GB cap on bandwidth per month with my ISP. With the amount of data generated by two heavily used computers, we'd be getting close to exceeding that every month, I think. And backing up just some of our data would put us back to square one. Also, a full restore over the Internet would take days or weeks. That's fine if the service is a backup of a backup and your house has just burned down (you'd be grateful to get anything back at that point), but if you've just had a drive die on you, and you need your machine working the next day for a presentation, you'd be out of luck.
When transfer speeds improve dramatically, and ISPs give up monitoring bandwidth, something like this would come into its own, but for now, I wouldn't want it as my only backup.
by bsag @ 21/01/2008 7:11 pm • Permalink •
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