Jan152008

Macworld 2008 Thoughts

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Ok, keynote is over. I was busy refreshing the live Gizmodo site and Fake Steve’s Twitter for that whole 90 minutes. How did my predictions for the keynote turn out? I’d pretty much say they were all wrong.

My iPhone predictions were correct but I was just regurgitating the news of the leaked update anyway. My MacBook predictions might get a partial credit but I’m still caught off guard by how far out on a limb they’ve gone with the MacBook Air. The heavy reliance on wireless stuff reinforces their Airport Extreme update and their iTunes strategy. All we need now is wireless syncing for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Overall, the lesson here is for me not to make predictions. The rumor mills did pretty well this time and the whispers coming out of the respectable sites were pretty close to the mark. I think this means Apple leakers are getting smarter about disseminating information.

My wishlist? Time Capsule, because I need a new router to replace my weaksauce Airport Express and I need a new backup drive to store all my precious data.

Update: Airy Thoughts

So Apple has 3 different types of laptop now. That is too many and they know this. In the future, the features of the Air will get absorbed into the existing cheap and expensive lines. Right now, they’ve got this awesome laptop that doesn’t overlap enough with an existing product so they’re adding instead of replacing. I’m sure they wanted to replace but you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

There are lots of details to be ironed out. Can people survive without all the ports and DVD drive? Will the new form factor bring new complaints and defects? Will people end up snapping this thing in half because it’s so thin and light that it couldn’t possible be an entire laptop, right?

Therefore the laptop is suited towards a small group of people

  • People who replace their laptops pretty quickly
  • People who understand the limitations of the laptop and don’t care

Anyone else who buys it will end up whinging on the interweb about how they’re being tortured into buying from iTunes because there’s no CD/DVD drive or some other ridiculous complaint. Here’s an idea: read the damn website before you whip your credit card out. Your solution to these problems is to not buy stupid crap in the first place and save the money to take some lessons in how capitalism and the free market works.

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5 comments »

Clink

I don’t know anything about anything technical but damn I want that laptop. It’s just so…thin. And pretty.

And clearly I buy laptops for purely aesthetic reasons. ;)
chicky

hehehe yeah the laptop is pretty hot.

btw i found a way to get a macbook pro for free. convince boyfriend how cool the macbook pro is. talk about it all the time. show him pictures of it. screw up his pc so he’ll want a mac. he’ll buy said mac. fix pc. take mac. wa la!

(ps- i did not injure any pc in this process)
Jack

Yay feminism?
karan

I don’t it’s too many laptops – yet. With the Air, they’ve got a correspondence now between the ‘desktop’ lines and the ‘mobile’ lines – the MacBook Pro up at the pro end with the Mac Pro, the MacBook in the middle with the iMac, and the MacBook Air at the small end with the Mac Mini. There’s a price mismatch there, but I figure the analogy works.

What it depends on going forward is if the Mini is dropped, or the price of the Air drops to the point where its cannibalising MB sales; I’d go for the Air if it had one more USB port and was maybe $500 (AU) cheaper.
jinius

well, now im def not buying one! no cd/dvd drive? puh lease!

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