Those who know me will know that I am a bit of a fan of Apple products, not exclusively, but I do like good design and stylish kit.
Yesterday in San Francisco at MacWorld Expo, Apple announced some new products and upgrades for the iPod touch and iPhone.
Key new product announced at the keynote was the MacBook Air, a small light MacBook.
I do like small computers, great fan of the 10″Sony VAIO laptops, however this is slightly bigger than I would like, and I can’t see how that would survive travelling by air or train.
Don’t get me wrong I think it’s very stylish, well designed, but doesn’t meet my needs for a small portable computer for use at conferences, on the train and in coffee shops.
No rumoured touchscreen, nor a Blu-ray drive either (actually no optical drive, though cleverly you can use your other Mac’s drive wirelessly, which is a very clever piece of software and something I would like to use with Windows UMPCs).
Nor can you can carry a spare battery, actually you can’t even replace the battery, it has to be sent to Apple to be replaced if it goes faulty.
There was also upgrades for the iPhone and iPod touch announced which provide additional applications, annoyingly free on the iPhone and a £12.99 upgrade for the iPod touch.
Huh!
Probably worth it for the e-mail and notes applications which make the iPod touch a more useful.
Also announced was a new Airport Extreme base station which comes with a 500GB or 1TB drive for Time Machine backups.
On the Americans get the opportunity to rent films, here in the UK we don’t, well not for a while.
Overall I thought MWSF was pretty good.
I won’t be buying a MBA right away but will be seriously considering a future version as an if my TiBook starts to falter.
It appears the MBA battery is going to be fairly easy to replace even if it’s not officially “user-accessible”:
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/First-Look/Mac/MacBook-Air
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I happily paid the £13 for the iPod touch upgrade and am really enjoying the new functionality, for my needs this is nearly a PDA, if only To Dos and Notes would sync with Mail and iCal. Roll on the SDK:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/devcenter/third_party_apps.php
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Time Capsule is aggressively priced and high on my list of purchases.