Keynote Reactions
iPod touch update: Wonderful, simply wonderful. I have been running my touch jailbroken since I bought it in order to use the Mail and Notes apps — now I don’t have to. I’ll still be switching to an iPhone when (if) it becomes available in Canada, but I no longer have to worry about software updates in the meantime.
As far as the $20 price tag: It doesn’t bother me. Twenty bucks to go from an unsupported hack to a fully-supported set of applications is a perfectly acceptable price.
MacBook Air: Wow, that thing is really, really tiny. Dropping Ethernet and FireWire is ano-brainer. And the same applies to moving the SuperDrive to an external pod. The only thing I’m really surprised about is the single USB port. I would have expected two or three.
But I probably won’t be getting one. I don’t find the MacBook big or heavy, so the reduced volume doesn’t make a huge difference to me. I like the back-lit keyboard and the multi-touch trackpad. But I expect that by next year, when I’ll be looking for a new laptop, the complete MacBook line will have multi-touch trackpads.
And the Air does have some significant tradeoffs. The battery is sealed in the case, so I can’t tuck a spare in my Braincell. The case is aluminum, and I learned from my 12″ PowerBook G4 that an aluminum case in my possession will get very, very dented, very, very fast. The RAM is fixed at 2GB; it’s a good amount of RAM, but I prefer to have headroom. The hard drive is a non-user-swappable PATA drive spinning at 4200RPM. There is simply nothing good about the hard drive. The SSD option is priced up in the novelty range and unlikely to come down anytime soon.
The only really compelling feature of the Air is it’s volume (or lack thereof), and that feature doesn’t compel me.
Time Capsule: An AirPort extreme with a built-in hard drive. If I cared about the MacBook Air I would probably care more about this. The fact that Apple isn’t supporting Time Machine backups to USB-attached drives on the Time Capsule or the AirPort extreme makes me wonder just how ugly the firmware for these puppies is. It almost seems like they had to add an entire drive interface to make it Time Machine-compatible.
If I switch to an Apple-branded base station, it’d probably be a Time Capsule. That said, I see no reason to replace my trusty little DIR-655 anytime soon.
iPhone update: I’ll care about this when I can actually buy an iPhone.
iTunes Store Movie Rentals: “International later this year” probably doesn’t include Canada, but it would be nice if it did. I wouldn’t mind pulling the odd movie over the wire in full HD.
Apple TV: I was planning on adding an Apple TV to my system before the keynote. And after the keynote I’m still planning on adding one.
