Surprisingly Unsurprising.
January 15th, 2008 by Jerry
I have to say, I’m quite unimpressed with the announcements made at MacWorld by Apple. Perhaps Apple set the bar too high last year with the unexpected release of the iPhone, but I would have expected more from Apple in 2008.
iPhone Updates – New features include: location on maps, movable icons, and multi-recipient SMS. All of these features have been available using 3rd party software (requiring a relatively simple hack to unlock everything). They continue to (seemingly) ignore 802.1x authentication and Exchange syncing. I guess the only potential upside is that Apple acknowledged the upcoming iPhone SDK that will hopefully allow legitimate 3rd party applications. I don’t expect them to have simple, straightforward licensing, and they’re certainly not going to remove all their encryption and hardware protection and grant full access to the iPhone, so I don’t know how useful the SDK will ultimately be.
iTunes Movie Rentals – Yawn. There are much cheaper, although less snazzy, ways to rent movies.
AppleTV Updates – Don’t have AppleTV, but the updates seem to only allow movie rentals, so the yawn continues here.
Time Capsule – (a network-attached storage device for Time Machine backups) This adds the ability that should have been available at the release of Leopard. It looks proprietary (meaning I doubt other types of NAS will work), so current Airport Extreme owners are probably up a creek. For those lucky enough to not have an Airport Extreme station, this will double as both a NAS hard drive and a wireless base station (and print server) so it’s not all bad.
MacBook Air – It’s thin. It’s light. It has an LED-backlit screen. The battery will last a while (5 hours of wireless usage), and the trackpad is a little better. Everything beyond these features is a significant step backwards from even a MacBook. Slower processors, non-upgradeable 2GB memory, one (1!) USB port, no ethernet (optional USB attachment), no optical drive (optional USB attachment), no Firewire (optional USB.. wait, no). It costs more than a fully loaded MacBook, which is only 2 lbs. heavier and has a much faster processor, faster and bigger hard drive, marginally less battery life, etc. At the end of the day, the MacBook Air is still just an expensive, underpowered laptop. How much is it really worth to have a lighter laptop? (Although the added accessories to make it as usable will more than make up for the lower weight.) The only bright side to this thing is that it will prompt lots of technophiles to throw vast amounts of their money at Apple, which I hope will fund a real computing revolution.
Oh, and what about multi-touch? A multi-touch trackpad has actually been in the PowerBook/MacBook for a while, and the new one only allows a couple extra features that may or may not see much use. This is the smallest possible upgrade that Apple could have done while still being able to mention “multi-touch.” Wake me up when they release a multi-touch screen or a multi-touch keyboard interface. Given Apple’s yearly release cycle, it may be a while.
Now it’s up to Canon to release something impressive. Otherwise, I’ll have to suspect that for me, 2008 will be a technological lull.