For the last few years I have always wanted something that was shown at Macworld San Francisco by Apple. Last year it was the Apple TV that lets me watch internet content on my big screen television from my comfy chair. Most expos they release 3-5 new products that are interesting, but not personally compelling except for one. This year Apple showed three compelling new products that I want now.
The most revolutionary is a little gadget called Time Capsule. This device is a network attached backup disk (NAS), Wi-Fi base station (WAP), gigabit ethernet switch/router, and USB printer server all in one. Two capacities: 500GB and 1TB for reasonable prices. This makes Time Machine on several machines back up to one big shared drive. I am getting one of these for the house, and can see Apple having trouble keeping them in stock.
I have wanted a smaller and lighter laptop for many years. I even briefly experimented with a Fujitsu Lifebook B142L, and the hardware was cool and light, but Windows was an unacceptable operating system so I have avoided all the Windows based PC ultra-lights (most of which have very good hardware). I have a 12″ PowerBook G4, and I like it a lot… but even though it is small, it is quite heavy (over 5 pounds). It has many things built into it’s shell that I rarely use… (optical drive, cable bundles, modems, etc). So the showing of the brand new MacBook Air is a long awaited dream machine come true for me. I want one very much. I will wait a little, and get a few questions answered, but I will likely upgrade to the lovely little machine fairly soon. I know that smaller and lighter is not for everyone, but it is definitely for me and for many people like me.
The third compelling new device is the re-launch of last year’s Apple TV, with a pretty major software update to handle movie rentals and flickr and .Mac photos. The software update will go into the older AppleTV devices to with an upgrade due in a couple of weeks, but I want the larger (160GB) capacity model as our 40GB one is filling up regularly. I love my current AppleTV and get plenty of fantastic content for free off the internet every day. Adding movie rentals is not compelling for me, but being able to hit photo galleries online will free up the internal disk space that had photo slide shows until now.
There is also an iPhone update (Erci is playing with that now, the big question is will Notes be able to sync with the Desktop/Laptop), an iPod touch update, updates to QuickTime, iTunes, and some other software. The new location finder on the iPhone maps application is amazing, GPS-like navigation without GPS reception, and it works!
Egads! Now I sound like an Apple fan-boy… but I am not… these are just practical innovations.
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