I haven't been a regular blogger for some time now, at least a year or two (I haven't gone back through my archives to see when the last time I was updating with any regularity was but it was certainly a while ago), but I may try to start doing it a bit more again.
What better place to start than with my thoughts on the products and such announced at this years MacWorld?
On the whole, it seemed like a good steve keynote. Nothing incredible or too terribly unexpected was announced, but a large number of solid products and services were announced, an some goodies were released within minutes and hours of the keynote.
The most immediately exciting thing for me was the iPhone 1.1.3 update. The ability to reorganize the icons on my home page, and the ability to add links and such seems nice and will be really important come February when third parties get the ability to make apps for the iPhone (i'm really really excited about this). Really though the feature that I'm most excited about and impressed with are the new features in Google Maps.
When the iPhone was first announced and demo'd it was unclear if there was GPS in the thing. When Steve showed us the ability to find starbucks' around the expo center it appeared that the iPhone already knew where he was. It didn't. There was no gps in it, and you had to manually enter your starting address to do things like that. It was mildly disappointing but not a huge surprise and not that big a deal either, as it's not that hard to just enter your current location. Having google maps on my phone was still useful, especially when Sarah and I went on vacation and could get directions to various places with ease. But it still seemed like it'd be a lot better with some sort of GPS style function built in.
1.1.3 gives us something approximating that. By triangulating your position relative to cell phone towers or known Wi-Fi hotpsots the iPhone now gives you a pretty good approximation of where you are, and you can use that as the starting address (or presumably the ending one) for directions. They also added the ability to move the "pin's" that show up in the map when you put in an address, which is good because sometimes G-Maps gets addresses slightly wrong (for example it's always been convinced that I live on the other end of my street. Not a huge deal but indicative of potential problems with other addresses and such). This feature is really quite impressive, and a very smart way to add a feature people want without having to upgrade the hardware. (As best I know this feature doesn't replace GPS though, it can't follow you as you move around and tell you directions as you're moving, but it's still useful, especially if you're somewhere unfamiliar and want to find a restaurant or something.)
iTunes video rentals seems like a decent idea, most movies you only want to watch once or twice, and the rest you're likely to want to buy, so having a low priced option to rent them seems like a decent idea, but in the era of netflix, $3 seems a bit steep (and $4 for an HD one seems steep too) for something that I have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting (for a good explanation of why that's a problem see this post from Daring Fireball about why that's just too short, and honestly kind of strange.). It could be good for an impulse buy/rent like "oh I want to see X right now" but for close to the same price I could go to a video store and rent something on DVD, with more features and less restrictions on how I use it. I could also keep it for several days to a week and watch it at my leisure during that time.
If they lowered the price by about a dollar I might start considering something like this. Assuming I were to get an Apple TV that is, which brings us to...
...the Apple TV. Seems like they've finally added a number of features that people have wanted from the begining (like being able to buy/rent movies and music directly from the AppleTV rather than having to get them on your mac and then sync/stream them to the Apple TV. It's also evidently got an upgraded interface and that's the only place you can rent HD content (probably because the studios are stupid and REALLY worried about piracy). It's also cheaper than it used to be, and the old ones can be upgraded via a software update. All in all it makes the AppleTV a bit more compelling but still not something I'm really excited about buying, especially since most of it's features can be duplicated by either my Tivo or my Xbox 360, with a small amount of work on my computer. I was hoping Apple would introduce their own line of HDTV's with the features of the AppleTV built in. Thinking about this a while ago I got really excited about the possibilities (I may write about that some later).
There was also the announcmeent of the "Time Capsule" which is an Airport Extreme BaseStation with a hard drive (500gig or 1 terrabyte) built in, for use as a backup volume for Macs on your network using Time Machine. I believe it can also be used as a general network storage device too. It's cool but it's a feature that the old base station was supposed to have if you attached a USB hard drive to it, but they pulled the feature at the last minute, presumably because they couldn't get it working properly. From what I understand the feature doesn't work well at all, even outside of using it for Time Machine. I do hope apple steps up and fixes this problem (it is listed as a bug) soon, or it's going to look like the pulled the feature just to sell another product. Hopefully that fix'll be coming soon as I can't really see any reason why having the hard drive built in would make it all that much easier for the feature to work than having it attached by USB. If they fix that problem I might consider buying on of the base stations and hooking up my own hard drive to it.
The "big" news out of this keynote was the MacBook Air. I'm not personally too excited about it because it's not really targeted at me. It is pretty cool looking, and is impressively thin, but it's kind of expensive and lacks a lot of features I'd want in any laptop I got. If I were some sort of road warrior and weight and size were a big issue for me, and things like a decent graphics card, and the ability to run really powerful apps weren't important to me I'd be pretty interested. But I'm not, so it isn't all that exciting for me besides just looking cool. I do like the "remote disk" feature is pretty cool and I could actually see it being useful in a lot of situations. Basically because the Air doesn't have a disk drive of any kind, if you want to install software on it you can "borrow" the disk drive of a mac or PC in the area that has some software installed on it. It's a pretty slick idea. I don't know how much of market there is for this sort of thing, this could be another Cube, ie something really cool that doesn't really have much of a market, or it could be a hit among certain people. Or more likely it'll be somewhere in between.
I'm excited to find out more details on all of these products as reviewers get a chance to use them hands on, and as more info comes out from Apple. I'm also excited to find out about all the other smaller stuff that gets introduced by other companies at MacWorld. All in all a solid if slightly less than thrilling Macworld so far.
