I love MacWorld. I’ve never been, but I enjoy refreshing my browser every 30 seconds to get the lowdown on what’s being announced in Steve Job’s keynote speech.
This year, here’s the goods and what I feel about them:
1) Time Capsule – a wireless external hard drive. Probably my favourite of the bunch because it’s something I could use. Nice. Although, the price seems a little extreme. For example, the 1TB model goes for $499 whereas I just checked and you can get the wired model on Tiger Direct for $330. However, it does seem cool to have it as a wireless drive, but when you think about it, we already have that at home with Mike’s drive which is hooked up to the wireless router.
2) iPhone and iPod Touch update – While many others are probably saying “Heck yeah!” to the additional software coming for these products, I am not as I do not own any of them. However, I think the $20 fee for the iPod Touch software upgrade is kind of lame.
3) Apple TV + iTunes Movie Rentals – Yet again, another thing that doesn’t impress me too much. Sure…it’s cool that you can rent movies online now. I think this will be interesting to see how it works out, but I know a lot of people who order Payperview or Rogers-On-Demand instead of going to their local video store, so it may end up being just as popular.
4) MacBook Air – The world’s thinnest laptop. While initially impressed (heck, it came out of an envelope! AWESOME!), the price has scared me away. $1800 USD for something that a) Only has one USB port b) Has no optical drive to read CDs/DVDs seems a little excessive to me. However, there are always ways around these things for the savvy…you could always get a USB hub to plug in so you quadruple the amount of inputs you have. The optical drive can be bought external for another $100, or if you ever need to desperately get something off of a drive, you just find one in the house (or close to you I guess) and there is some software that will search for the drive and then use it for you. I would definitely have to see this in action to believe it. I find it hard to believe that it will be a simple matter of just finding a cd-rom drive to pop in your Smashing Pumpkins cd and it scans the room for it and then transmits it wirelessly. I’m scared of the practicality of this option actually.
Benoit and I had a good amazing look on our faces when we saw that there was an option for a Solid State chip of 64GB as your hard drive but then had a good laugh when it would cost an extra $1,000 to install it.
So there you have it. While I’m not overly impressed with any products (I don’t even think I would buy the MacBook Air if I were purchasing a laptop at this point), I am impressed with certain trends that they are moving forward with:
1) The Wireless World ~ It’s made blatantly obvious when they don’t even install a CD/DVD drive into a laptop that Apple wants everything to be wireless. Want your music? Buy it wirelessly/digitally from the Internet. Want to watch/purchase a film? Buy it off of iTunes. Want to access a tv show you downloaded but it’s not on your laptop? Just wirelessly connect to the Time Capsule external hard drive and voila! In some ways, there needs to be Apple in this world to bring out these products before they are perfect so it gets the industry thinking even more into the future. Remember all those blue CAT5 cables running around your house so everyone could have the Internet? You would laugh if you saw those in your house nowadays considering there is the wireless router.
2) The Solid State Industry ~ Hard drives will go the way of the do-do bird soon enough. Solid state (flash) drives will be the future and the future says “Heck, it’s going to take a lot for me to break down because I have no spinning parts.” That’s the problem with hard drives (although it’s been quite a few years since my last hard drive conked out so they must make them pretty sturdy nowadays) and why the world will be governed by flash drives in the future. Already we are seeing the iPod touch have a 16GB flash drive inside of it. It’s small and can’t really break on you. While I laugh at the idea of paying $1,000 for a 64GB drive, I can see that in a year’s time, the iPod touch will probably be available in a 64GB model for $500. I bought a 60GB iPod 2 years ago and it was a hard drive for the same price. Think about that. I’m excited by the solid state future.