Macworld afterthoughts…
Now that the Reality Distortion Field has worn off the Stevenote, let’s take a look at what Macworld brought me this year.
First we received some really nice statistics. Leopard sold more than 5 million copies in the first three months. Wow. Astonishing. Lumped into number one was Time Capsule. Time Machine is part of Leopard, and Time Capsule is intended to seamlessly back up (up to) 50 macs on your network. Not so much important to me. I’m already happy with my current Time Machine setup. Maybe in a couple years or more I’ll be ready for this.
Second, Steve talked about the iPhone. 4 million iPhones sold to date. That’s an average of 20 thousand sold – per day. Again, wow! He also mentioned the SDK that will be available in February, and talked about the iPhone update that would be available today. Nice. This second part of the Stevenote makes me pretty excited. I have already updated my iPhone with the latest software. The the updated maps application is awesome. He also talked about the iPod Touch. That part doesn’t really show up on my “wow” scale since I have the iPhone.
Third, Steve introduced rentals on iTunes. Now this is what I’ve been waiting for! Now my Apple TV will be used twice as much. Free software update coming to the Apple TV within a couple weeks. Apple TV will become my source for pay per view. Sweet. Watch the movies on my iPod, computer, iPhone, or Apple TV. Keep the movie for up to 30 days, and once you start to watch it you have 24 hours in which to finish it. Sounds great to me!
Number four, and final – the MacBook Air. Go ahead. Check out that link. I’ll wait. The world’s thinnest notebook computer. .7 inch thick on one end, and .1 inch thick on the other. It does have it’s compromises though. Battery is not user-replaceable, therefore no swapping when one battery dies, like you can on a standard notebook. Slower processor. No optical drive (CD/DVD). No Firewire ports. This machine is not intended to replace your Mac, whatever flavor it is that you have, but is meant to augment it. It’s also available with a smaller hard drive that is really nothing more than a RAM disk. That baby will run you over $3,000.00. But I guarantee you it will be lightning fast with that flash drive.
Back in the day, and by the day I mean in the mid 90s, I would partition off some of my RAM into a virtual hard disk. It was super fast. I eventually created a startup script that would create the RAM drive, copy over the necessary files for the application I wanted to run from this RAM disk, and start the application. This will be similarly as fast, I’m sure.
Tonight I rented a movie just to see if it would play on the Apple TV yet. No dice. Guess I have to wait for the Apple TV update. It does play on the computer and my iPhone though.