Island in the Net by Khürt Williams
Technology and Photography Musings. Established circa 2000.
Charles Miller gets the Air.
If you think about it, everything that Apple have left off the MacBook Air is something that 90% of the population don’t need 90% of the time. If my MacBook Pro didn’t have Firewire, or only had one USB port, or even didn’t have an optical drive, I don’t think I’d even notice more than once a month, and I’d not find it hard to compensate for their absence those few times.
I was in the Computing in the Cloud Workshop at Princeton University yesterday, but there was quite a bit of buzz at MacWorld as well. The highlights:
Apple takes the concept of a hard drive plugged into the AirPort Extreme base station one more step further and combines the two and call is Time Capsule. These new Airport Extreme base stations are the same form factor and features as the previous model (802.11n, 4 Gigabit Ethernet ports ) but now includes either a 500GB ($299) or 1TB ($499) hard drive. Users will be able to wireless backup any Mac over the network. This easy backup feature is undoubtedly an answer to the prayers of many MacBook users who hated connecting external drives.
Apple TV did not do as well as Apple had hoped and did not live up to the expectations of users. This time Apple hopes to get it right. Jobs announced Movie Rentals through the iTunes store as well as revamped Apple TV that will allow users to download standard-def and HD quality TV without the need for a computer. Users can also synchronised content back to any iTunes enabled computer. Of course, content from Mac, Flickr and YouTube can also be provided through the device.
The feature story of MacWorld, however, had to be the new MacBook Air. This is a new interpretation of the wildly popular notebook line from Apple. This is a notebook computer that is truly as thin as a notebook. The MacBook Air weighs less than 3 lbs and is just under an inch thick at its thickest point. Apple dropped the width and weight by kicking the optical drive to the curb and even more weight savings are to be had if the user opts for an optional 64GB flash drive instead of the standard 80GB magnetic hard drive. Steve Jobs apparently hates ports because now USB, FireWire and video ports are hidden inside a drop down panel on the side of the machine. The MacBook Air also inherits the aluminum casing of the MacBook Pros. For me those were the major changes that stand out. EDITED: The MacBook Air does not have FireWire, Ethernet, or audio input/output.
Oh boy! I think I am becoming an Apple fan boy. And I am starting to spread my propaganda. But my influence is closer to home. In fact it is home. I now have two macs in the house; a G4 mac mini that I bought last year to test the waters and a macbook I bought this summer.
My son, Shaan, is a LEGO fanatic. (Is fanaticism genetic?) He has one of those large size plastic storage bins - you know the one's you find at Target or Wal-mart - filled with all size of LEGO. He spend quite a bit of time playing the on-line games at lego.com and he has a dogeared copy of the LEGO catalog that he walks around with.
He wanted me to download and install the LEGO Digital Designer onto his Dell Windows XP computer. For some reason the gane would not run. I downloaded the latest Windows patches, rebooted, rebooted again but...the game would not work. Shaan noticed that LEGO provided a mac version so I downloaded and installed that on my macbook. He had a great designing his own sets. I see an engineer/architect in training.
A few days ago I was talking to my younger brother, Richard, about the mac and OS-X and iLife etc. I was telling him how great the platform was; "It just works!". He kept asking questions about CPUs and compatibility with his software and is it easy to use blah blah blah. I had the right answers. Macs now use Intel CPU, I told him; the same ones that Dell and HP use. Macs run Microsoft Office and with iTunes you can download movies, music, and television shows. We talked at length for almost and hour. Good thing I have voice over IP service; Richard lives in Florida. He's now considering a macbook for his next laptop purchase.
After hearing the conversation that I had with my brother, Shaan walked over and said something similar to this:
"Papa, Windows is made by Microsoft and Microsoft Windows is not very good. My games never work. I want you to replace my computer with an iMac from Apple. iMacs just work." - Shaan, 7 years old
I almost cried tears of joy.
