KEY POINTS:
After the hype and hearsay there was the reality and it didn't please the market. Apple's shares are down seven per cent following Apple boss Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld as Apple made some widely expected product releases and failed to produce others that were considered safe bets.
I
just watched a CNBC interview with Jobs who talked up the demanding design specifications the MacBook Air required.
"We decided a few years ago to build the world's thinnest notebook, we probably built a hundred models to get to this." he said.
"Intel did a great job in minimising their very fast Core 2 Duo processor. This is all precision-machined aluminium to get it this light and thin."
He revealed that Apple has sold four million iPhones, a staggering number really, given the 200 day timeframe the iPhone has been in the market. Wall Street was hoping for closer to five million it seems.
And Jobs knocked on the heads the wild speculation that China Mobile had walked away from negotiations to bring the iPhone to China. Jobs told CNBC that one China Mobile executive had visited Cupertino in the past but there were no negotiations.
Jobs seemed unfazed by the share-price drop: "The customer feedback we get on the iPhone is off the charts. To make a product that's so beloved, you just know its going to be a success," he said.
It was always going to be near-impossible to top Macworld 2007 and the iPhone launch, but despite the flat tone this year, the MacBook Air props up the event as a history-making device.
MacBook Air
As was widely tipped, Apple released an ultra-thin, lightweight laptop but without some of the features that were rumoured. There was no touch-screen, tablet-like interaction, though Apple has improved the MacBook track-pad so you can pinch your fingers to zoom in on web pages and use some of other iPhone-like gestures to navigate webpages and documents. There was no solid-state disc drive as standard - you can buy a 64GB version for the MacBook Air (US$1799), but it will be expensive.
The Air itself looks impressive. Consider this: it is .16 of an inch at one end, .76 of an inch at the thick end. It weighs around 3 pounds or 1.4kg. That officially makes it the thinnest laptop on the market ahead of thin laptops like the Sony TZ and the Toshiba Portege. The MacBook Air doesn't skimp on features - there's a 13.3 inch LED-backlit screen, 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo chip as standard, 2GB of RAM, 80GB hard drive.
As you'd expect, there's no built-in disc drive on a device that thin, you have to buy an external drive US$99. However Remote Disk software is being made available to allow a MacBook Air user to borrow the disc drive of a Mac or PC on the same network to install software. That sounds like a pretty good compromise for people who don't need a disc drive for heavy duty use.
Remote Disk software is being released and it enables you to "borrow" the optical drive of another Mac or PC on the same network as the MacBook Air, to use for installing software, for example.
iPhone
Some decent updates for the iPhone, but not the much-rumoured 3G iPhone and no official unveiling of the iPhone software developers kit. Developers will have to wait until the end of next month for that.
Still, the best application currently on the iPhone is the implementation of Google Maps and Apple has honed in on that app, improving it to include new embedded maps functionality that constantly plots your position on the Google Map - presumably triangulating your position using mobile phone cell sites as the iPhone doesn't have a GPS module in it. Finally the iPhone gets multi-person SMS which should have been a feature from launch.
iPod Touch
There were updates for the wireless iPod Touch allowing full email functionality, stock quotes, weather, notes and webclips, but Touch owners will have to pay US$20 for the update ( http://gizmodo.com/345061/apple-adds-mail-maps-and-more-to-ipod-touch-+-for-20)! It will be interesting to see if that sparks any kind of backlash.
Check out the full details of Apple's iTunes deal with the movie studios. It's hard to get excited about this when a deal allowing movies to be downloaded from the New Zealand iTunes website is probably still some time away.
Still, I like the look of the new Time Machine hardware. Apple is quietly making convenient back-ups of data one of its incredibly strong points, with 802.11n wireless networking allowing you to remote back-up files on the computers in your home. Very nice.
What did you think of the news of out MacWorld. What would you be willing to pay for the MacBook Air when it lands here? $2000? $2500? $3000? Nothing at all?
