Apple has launched another of its ingenious “Get a Mac” banner ads on the New York Times front page. As Mac and PC chat in a sidebar, a seemingly unrelated ad up above becomes a topic of discussion and then manipulation.
Pretty brilliant — PC “correcting” a “typo” in a Wall Street Journal review so it says “Leopard is better and faster than Vista – NOT!” Nicely done. And now to correct the rest of the Internet, indeed.
So I’ve been tossing the MacBook Air’s (de)merits around in my head since about 10:30 this morning, and I’ve reached some conclusions. Some good, some bad. It’s not the machine I’m looking for (I still want a small form-factor MacBook Pro), but it’s got some pluses to go with the minuses we’ve already called out. Your comments would be appreciated.
Pros:
Dude, it’s like totally thin.
Multi-touch track pad.
Seriously thin.
No, it fits in a manila envelope.
MANILA.
ENVELOPE!
And it weighs three pounds.
It’s faster than the first Core Solo Intel Mac mini that Apple released.
The hidden port hatch is pretty darn cool.
Overall design is absolutely gorgeous. Very few people change their laptop batteries on the fly, so I appreciate a nice, cohesive frame that hides the internals.
Cons:
Super-minimal I/O. What, 4-pin FireWire was too bulky for you? Someone tell Sony that FireWire doesn’t work in an ultra-compact laptop!
MacBook-sized footprint. This thing is only thinner, not smaller. It’s not taking up less of your lap, and it’s still bigger than a 12″ Powerbook.
Giant bezel around the screen. If you’re stressing how small this thing is, shouldn’t you build in design elements that stress how much you’ve packed into such a tiny package? A 1″ border on a 13.3″ screen is available on the MacBook. How exactly does this stress professional needs and storage considerations?
I can buy an iPod classic with a 160 gig hard drive for $349, plug it into a MacBook Air and TRIPLEits storage capacity. The fact that I can’t put the same hard drive into a MacBook Air is ridiculous. There’s no excuse for an 80 gig ceiling, no matter how thin the box is.
No mobile broadband built-in. Kind of makes the whole “Air” thing moot if I need to find a hotspot to crank this up.
Multi-touch on a trackpad is nowhere near as nice as multi-touch on an iPhone or iPod touch.
Apple made a sacrifice of functionality in pursuit of a goal that might or might not be the most important virtue. Sure, thinness is a nice-to-have. But isn’t weight and overall size more important for the sub-compact market?
Steve Jobs’ much-ballyhooed movie rental service looks all fine and dandy, but the question in my mind is: “How long will it be before the service offers a single decent movie to rent?”
At present, the movies on offer are even shittier than the local video store, or those available on-demand from my cable providor, Comcast, which utterly stinks.
It’d be depressing if all Apple offered was popcorn garbage. Surely the service is serving the wrong demographic. Early adopters, the kind that run out to buy an AppleTV box, are surely more interested in less mainstream fare. How long will it be before there’s some independent movies, classics, artsy fartsy foreign stuff, and genre titles?
Eagle-eyed readers of Think Secret may have noticed that the site is still publishing.
Many assumed that Think Secret would cease publishing after the site’s owner, Harvard undergrad Nick Ciarelli, reached a settlement with Apple in December concerning Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit, and Ciarelli’s first amendment countersuit. (For which Ciarelli was rumored to have received a low six-figure sum from Apple).
But on Tuesday, Think Secret published a story and two galleries of photos from Macworld. On Monday, the site briefly published a pre-Macworld rumor, but quickly withdrew said item without explanantion. (There’s a screengrab here).
“The last day that BackBeat Media-brokered ads will appear on Think Secret is February 14th, 2008, and content will be posted on the site regularly at least until then,” writes Hamilton.
When asked about the situation, Ciarelli sent a note pointing to Hamilton’s blog post, but declined to elaborate further.
The Steve Jobs/Bill Gates lovefest that first became apparent at the WSJ’s D conference in the summer continues in the Times today. At the end of an post-keynote interview, Jobs said Gates should get a medal for his work at Microsoft! The Times’ Bits Blog reports:
Jobs saved his greatest compliment today for his former archrival Bill Gates, who has now largely retired will retire from Microsoft this summer.”Bill’s retiring from Microsoft is a big deal,” he said. “It’s a significant event, and I think he should be honored for the contributions he’s made.”
Jobs never praises Microsoft or Gates in public. There must be something afoot: A business deal, perhaps? Or maybe Jobs wants to give the Gates Foundation a few billion, but he feels they should first be billionaire buddies, like Warren Buffet?
Yes, Mac fans like the Air’s thin profile, but there’s a lot of bitching about its limitations — the price, soldered ram, non-replaceable battery, and paying extra for an ethernet port or DVD drive.
“It’s an expensive, disposable toy,” says one MacRumors reader.
Matching Wired’s leaked inside information to a T, Steve Jobs closed this year’s MacWorld keynote by unveiling the MacBook Air, the company’s first true subcompact since the PowerBook 2400. Weighing just 3 pounds and tapering from .76 inches down to an astonishing .16 inches, this is a dreambook. Absurdly light. Full 13.3 inch screen. Astonishing multi-touch trackpad with gestures borrowed form the iPhone. Available with SSD options. Starts at $1799.
Unfortunately, it’s not for everyone. I won’t be buying one, much as I would like to. Its processor is fairly slow, 1.6 Ghz or 1.8 Ghz. It is a Core 2 Duo, but not up to the kind of performance leap I want. The ram is soldered at 2 gigs. The hard drive is 80gigs or a 64 gig SSD. No other options. I want at least the storage of the biggest iPod classic, whose hard drive should fit in this thing. Its trim size is no different from the existing MacBook, which means a large bezel that just reminds how much more room could be used for a larger screen. This is perfectly set up as an executive’s stylish laptop for the web, watching rental movies from iTunes, and e-mail. Beyond that, it would mainly frustrate for what it won’t do. I guess I’ll be getting a MacBook Pro once the Penryn models (please have multi-touch, please have multi-touch) are announced. I guess we’ll continue without a true compact MacBook Pro.
Anyone up for it? It kind of seems like a MacBook that Steve Jobs would use — I don’t know how many others will.
Edit: New AppleTV is $229, a price cut. Additionally, all of the new features are available on the old version as a free software upgrade. Available in two weeks. Nice.
Conceding that its foray into movie download sales on iTunes has failed to meet expectations, Apple has announced the launch of iTunes Movie Rentals, featuring the films of all major movie studios. By the end of February, more than 1000 films will be available. Older titles are $2.99, new ones $3.99. You’ll get a 30 day window to watch, but just 24 hours to finish once you start (so forget about watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy all at once).
There is some really cool stuff here, however. Movies will start playing within 30 seconds of starting to download. You can transfer the file to an iPod or iPhone while watching it on a computer. It runs on Mac, PC, iPods, iPhones, existing AppleTV and an all-new high definition AppleTV. The new AppleTV can sync files from its hard drive back to your computer. That said, it’s a true stand-alone solution. No computer required.
Intriguing. Still not sure the AppleTV will ever take off. Still no price announcement. Will update when it gets posted to Wired.
Steve Jobs’s Macworld keynote is underway, and the most significant announcement thus far is what he hasn’t announced: Any upgrade to the iPhone. Though offering a new version of Google Maps for the device that provides GPS-like functionality (though nowhere near as accurate; Steve says it works “pretty doggone good.”).
That said, the iPod touch will be brought up to par with the iPhone in terms of available applications. For a $20 download on iTunes, anyone can now load Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes and Weather on their Touch. I don’t like the tendency as far as the potential prices for third-party apps, but let’s hope for the best.
Gadget Lab got a hot tip from an “Apple insider” this afternoon about the much-rumored “MacBook Air,” purported to be an ultra-light laptop that relies primarily on wireless technology instead of cables. Though the renderings in this post are merely clever photoshops (pretty clearly based on the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard), our friends at Wired say it sounds real:
An Apple insider told Wired today that the company’s new ultraportable, expected to be seen in public for the first time tomorrow, has an extremely thin profile and is shaped like a teardrop when closed thicker at the top behind the screen, tapering at the bottom behind the keyboard.
“It’s unbelievably thin,” said the source.
The device is made of aluminum and glass, and uses the same design language as recent Apple consumer products: black on silver.
The tapering is an interesting strategy. All of the tapering laptops I can think of are incredible fat at the hinge before getting somewhat thin at the edges. If it got no thicker than existing MacBook Pros and got thinner still? That would be hot. I don’t buy the inductive powering rumor, though. Though seemingly elegant, it would require a charging station, which seems pretty anti-Apple. Still, only 12 hours to go! Anyone else got a crazy rumor for the mill?
Our pals over at Wired Gadget Lab point us toward these humongous banners that Apple has positioned throughout Moscone Center for this year’s Macworld, reading “There’s something in the air.” (They’ll be live-blogging Tuesday — check it out!)
As you might expect, this has led to rampant speculation around the Internets, including the idea that Apple’s new ultra-light and -thin MacBook would adopt the surname “Air,” an idea popularized by the occasionally reliable and occasionally crazy 9to5Mac and MacRumors.
Everyone agrees, however, that this probably has something to do with wireless networking, either the arrival of WiMax on the Mac platform, or (more likely) the availability of HSDPA (3G) networks for new iPhones, true mobile broadband at last. I think the latter is much more likely, if only because the most enthusiastic proponent of WiMax is Motorola, and Steve Jobs absolutely hates Motorola.
After going back and forth, I’m making a very conservative forecast for this year’s Macworld. We’ll see Penryn-based MacBook Pros for sure, maybe Penryn MacBooks (could wait until February), Penryn iMacs, an announcement of new iPhones with more data and 3G (for delivery in the spring), and a thin-and-light MacBook Pro. But nothing with SSD, no multitouch for Mac, and no tabletMac. I think Apple has so many incremental upgrades to perform this time out that there won’t be much room for a huge, earth-shattering kaboom like last time around. I’m certainly hoping to be proven wrong, though.
The guys and gals of KathArt Interactive, a Danish interactive design firm, have put together a fun Steve Jobs keynote-eve game that puts you in charge of sneaking top-secret Apple product concepts to Macworld SF. It’s a lot like the game Adventure for Atari, only with 3-D graphics and 3G iPhone prototypes. Definitely worth a click, and the Danish-ness of it gets a bonus endorsement from me.
Great new “Get a Mac” spot from Apple last night showcasing the Mac OS X Leopard back-up utility Time Machine. A dozen Justin Longs as Mac — I don’t know whether to cheer or run screaming. Highly effective explanation of the technology, though. And it’s nice to see the campaign get kindler and gentler again after the Vista-attack ads.
I love the creativity of Mac users. Marcelo, a reader of Lifehacker, put together a great DIY laptop stand he cobbled together from an IKEA paper towel holder. He’s got tips for how to do it, but you really do need some serious hardware:
This was made from some plexi and an Ikea paper towel holder that I had laying around. I drilled some holes in the stainless steel crosspiece (don’t try this without a drill press and graduated high speed bits).
Gorgeous. Totally matches the aesthetic of the MacBook Pro. More pics at his Flickr stream.
The amazing video application Miro was just updated with a new Torrent engine in version 1.1, and it is incredibly fast. If you haven’t had the pleasure of using Miro, it’s like VLC plus BitTorrent plus an RSS reader — and also a phenomenal program guide. And now it’s significantly better — the Torrent performance is the best I’ve seen on a Mac. I downloaded an entire episode of Peep Show (from Season 3 — not available in the States for no apparent reason) in under a minute. And then deleted it, of course.
Colleague Fred Vogelstein has a great article on the creation of the iPhone in the new issue of Wired. It’s largely written based on anonymous sources (not a shock when dealing with Apple), but the narrative is quite compelling. I wish he got a bit more into just how much the iPhone has shaken up the wireless industry, but the article’s well-worth your time:
It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”
Thank you for all of your entries (23 in all!), but the winner of our recent Bill Gates retiring contest winner is Church of Apple, who managed to slyly take down all of Microsoft without getting juvenile. Nicely done.
I do have a soft spot for DJ Rizzo’s “The iPhone has nothing on Microsoft’s newest user interface: we call it the ‘multi-clapper.’ Not only can you ‘clap-on’ and ‘clap-off’ but you can also clap ‘ctrl-alt-delete’!” Strong second place. Well done.
My two favorite tech news sites — Gizmodo and Ars Technica — are hosting a pre-keynote party in San Francisco on Monday night (the 14th) at Harlot, 46 Minna Street. 8-11.30pm.
Giz editor Brian Lam is promising to buy everyone a beer, and there’s schwag (likely shite) for early birds. I’ll be there, and so apparently will Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve.
Last month, after a couple of eggnogs at the office, I drenched my keyboard in a cup of coffee. Kind readers suggested running it through the dishwasher. Of course, putting keyboards in dishwashers is the kind of thing you read on the internet all the time, but never believe it actually works.
So, skeptical that it would work, I tried it myself.I’m happy to report that running a filthy, coffee-stained keyboard through the dishwasher works great. The keyboard is spotless, and it works perfectly.
Feel me: dishwashers make keyboards better than new.
Taking some of the fun out of next week’s MacWorld Keynote, Apple announced new Mac Pros and xServes, each offering up to eight cores of Xeon goodness. The Mac Pros come STANDARD with eight cores (ranging from 2.8 up to 3.2Ghz) and support for dual 30-inch Cinema HD Displays, which is just ludicrous by about any standard. Of course, if you’re really a glutton for punishment, you can still install up to four graphics cards, each with support for two 30″ displays, meaning EIGHT giant screens. They’re taking the whole “Pro” thing seriously these days, which is really nice to see.
And now, we can just hope that new MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, iPhones and other new kinds of hardware are on the docket for next Tuesday.
Gizmodo has a fairly long interview with departing Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates in the wake of his final CES keynote. There’s a clip of interest, where Gates defines what he believes the difference between Microsoft and Apple to be. An interesting perspective, up to a point, though I think he continues to underestimate Apple’s strength if he believes it’s all in “usability.” Apple has excelled in introducing new kinds of interfaces to the world, which is a very different kind of strength.
Still, I thought this still image was mildly humorous. Your name in lights if you come up with the best caption! Post them in the comments thread.
John Siracusa posted his essential Apple Keynote Bingo Card yesterday. This year, it’s modeled on a Newton MessagePad, which is just a lovely ironic tweak of the nose for the very anti-Newtown Steve Jobs. Remember, you need to print yours out and actually call bingo! at the actual keynote, so head over to Ars to get your PDF copy and decode the various squares.
I have to say, column 2, row three strikes me as the most likely of the card. Maybe even more than the free square.
BusinessWeek reports that sources claim Apple has a deal with Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Lionsgate to allow sales, rentals or both through iTunes. If so, this could prove a huge boon for Apple. At last year’s All Things D conference, CEO Steve Jobs referred to its digital television device business as “a hobby.” Though promising an iPod for the living room, the AppleTV has been quite slow to catch on by Apple’s recent standards. That’s according to sales estimates from analysts and also anecdotal evidence: I’ve been to a lot of geeks’ houses in San Francisco and never seen a single AppleTV in the living room.
At this point, I’m ready to admit that Apple’s assumptions for the movie market were flat-out wrong — barely anyone wants to own movies in download format alone. I haven’t bought a single film myself, but there have been plenty of times when I would gladly rent a movie download — it’s faster than NetFlix and easier than walking down the street to Blockbuster. At the same time, for the movies I love, I want a tangible artifact to hold onto. I want to explore their special features and revisit favorite scenes. At the moment, Apple’s downloads are worse than what I can get at the store. But a rental? Heck, if it means staying on the coach, I’m in. Especially if it’s less than $3.
