by cg on January 15, 2008
The MacBook Air is so slim… mainly because it comes without a lot of things, besides an optical drive.
For one thing, the battery is ‘integrated’, meaning you can’t change it. No spare batteries for long flights or business trips. If you’re flying coach, spare batteries are handy – there’s no power jack in coach on most airlines (good excuse to fly business class). The magsafe connector is different, meaning you can’t use older magsafe power supplies.
There’s no Ethernet port (there is an inexpensive USB to Ethernet adapter). There’s no FireWire and only one USB port (looks like Apple is finally shooting FireWire). If you want a mouse and, say, the optical drive at the same time, you’re going to need a USB hub (and there might be power problems with that).
Apparently, you can’t add RAM, either. Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom and Final Cut users may have issues with a ‘mere’ 2GB of RAM.
To be fair, every other ultralight makes trade offs. Apple’s choices may be good ones… we’ll just have to get one and see… (photos courtesy Apple Computer)
by cg on January 15, 2008
MacBook Air (above – photo courtesy Apple Computer)
10:45 AM (PST) Randy Newman entertains.
[Brief pause while we retrieve escaped dog]
10:14 AM (PST) MacBook Air debuts, .76 inch thin.13-inch display, full-size keyboard. Under 3 lbs. 1.6 or 1.8 GHz Core Duo. 80 GB HD or 64 GB SSD. (Looks like rumor sites were right on). $1799. MacBook Air produced with Aluminum case, no Mercury, less packaging. Al Gore influnce? (MacObserver) (Macworld)
10:09 AM (PST) Demoing movies streaming from .Mac, photos from Flickr etc. Some glitches. (MacObserver) (Macworld)
9:46 AM (PST) Announces Apple TV2 set-top box. Doesn’t require a Mac to make iTunes content, including rentals, available to TV. $229. Free SW upgrade for owners of previous box.(MacObserver) (Macworld)
9:44 AM (PST) Steve announces 1000 movie rentals from 6 studios to be available on iTunes. $3.99 for library titles, $4.99 for new releases, $1 more for HD. (Macworld)
9:38 AM (PST) Steve previously noted that 20% of the Mac base had upgraded to Leopard – some 5 million copies. (Macworld)
9:30 AM (PST) Steve is demoing iPhone/Google maps integration. iPhone can find its location using a button in the corner of the screen. A $20 software update for iPod Touch brings this and more. (MacObserver)
9:22 AM (PST) Steve has announced Time Capsule, an Airport Extreme base station with either a 500GB or a 1 TB hard drive, a ‘backup appliance,’ and wireless compliment to Time Machine at $299 and $499 respectively. (MacObserver)
by cg on January 15, 2008
Intelliscanner, the company that brought bar-code scanning to the masses with the Intelliscanner mini, has announced a new product, Intelliscanner SOHO. The SOHO product features a more robust scanner and software (including Mac versions), like inventory control, that should appeal to small business operators. Ebayers, get your credit cards out…
by cg on January 15, 2008
We’ll shortly begin this years version of the Steve Jobs ‘Reality Distortion Field.’ I’ll be watching the usual sources, like MacObserver, from my lair deep in suburban Menlo Park. I could have driven up to Moscone at 5:00 AM to get in line… but then again, naahhhh…
by cg on January 15, 2008
Izzy Bromberg was kind enough to demo Human Eyes’ Creative3D application for me recently. Creative3D can quickly make 3D out of 2D and add animation that plays back in lenticular 3D creations – those plastic thingies that you used to get in Crackerjack boxes. Nowadays lenticular pieces can be wall-sized displays in airports or fine-grained business cards. Creative3D appears to be the app to extend your projects into this medium…