Thoughts on the New Apple Stuff

So another MacWorld come and gone. It seems that the world was not so excited by it, I’m not sure why - I thought it was a kick ass keynote. Except for maybe the Time Capsule, I was excited and wanted to own 3 of the 4 points he raised.

Time Capsule - I see why it’s cool and probably would want one if not for the lustworthiness of the Drobo and new Droboshare which is probably more than double the cost, but also provides for redundancy and easy upgradeability. Although to be honest, I think I still might end up with one of these if I hem and haw too much over the Drobo…

The the iPhone upgrade to 1.1.3? I finally got it and I love it. The map finder works quite well - when I stepped outside, much of the time it was pretty pinpoint accurate but did fluctuate a lot - the most it did was once showing about a block radius.

Rearranging the icons on the homepage (and multiple home screens) is awesome - I love it when the buttons wiggle! I wish, though, that you could position them absolutely instead of all the buttons pushing themselves up and left. I’d love to, basically, bottom align them - I find then when I’m using the iPhone one handed the sweet spot is the bottom few rows - the top two rows are a bit harder to access. So especially on a new screen all the stuff is along the top and slightly annoying to tap with the thumb.

Web clips are fantastic. Since I’ve got the iPod on double tap of the hardware button I can now move that icon off the dock and add Google Reader - probably the single thing I do most on my iPhone - in there. It’s awesome. After reading how to get the iPhone to set a provided image for use on the iPhone home screen (instead of using a screen shot), I had my wife photoshop me up one for this very blog and it looks awesome, just like a real app. If you’re reading this on the iPhone - save this blog to your homepage and check it out! Seriously, do it. I can’t wait for all sites to start adding in these images because those screen caps look lame on my home screens, it’s totally the new favicon.

Multiple SMS is… ok. It is annoying that you can’t create groups in your contact list - you have to create them one at a time in the SMS app. Although, beyond that it’s pretty cool - I found it strange at first glance that replies went to the individual conversation, not the group - but I guess that makes sense if they’re just replying to you. At any rate, I have almost no need for it - since I only have 1 friend all my texting is easy, but for lots of other folks lack of this feature was a deal killer.

AppleTV 2? This thing is awesome - when I move I’ll almost certainly be getting one of these. I just want an easy and good way to get video and music over to my tv and stereo. And with those rentals - the price is good so it’ll be a good supplement or alternative to checking out the video on demand for Time Warner (which works maybe 1/2 the time anyway). I think, long term, this is probably the beginning of the Apple’s dominance in the video world.

And the MacBook Air?? This thing is awesome. Already reports are coming in about how dumb people think it is - .4GHz slower than the mbp’s, no replaceable battery, no firewire, doesn’t make breakfast, wanh wanh wanh. It’s 3 pounds, sharp enough to cut bread and full powered. Interestingly it turns out that there’s at least a few people who don’t do video editing on their computers or photoshop 10GB images, I know it’s hard to believe, I myself just finished editing my latest feature film but I heard there’s people who don’t. There’s at least a few people who need office productivity, internet access and a variety of other light processing work - they need to carry around their computers all the time and having a computer that can do all that, with a sharp screen and half the weight is a real boon.

It’s obviously a purpose built machine - it isn’t for everyone. But I suspect there’s a pretty reasonably sized group of people that have been waiting for this. And with the multi-touch trackpad and the fancy low power screen? This portends great things for Apple’s laptop line up. It is wierd how Apple is turning against FireWire, though. But still. I want one. And you do, too.

Jan 16th, 2008 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: apple