Macworld 2008 Announcements

Several new things were announced at Macworld yesterday. Here's my brief, uninformed take on each.



MacBook Air: New ultralight laptop. The message boards are pretty negative on this one, but I think it mostly misses the boat. This is not designed for a tech-head or intensive user. Frankly, it's designed for people who could use the vanilla MacBook but want something cooler. I don't think they'll sell a ton of them, but they're probably good for staking out some more 'cool design' territory. It's eye candy for the coffeehouse set. And for that, it's pretty tasty. Very curious to hear about the performance of the 64Gb SSD drive option.

Time Capsule: Combined WiFi base station and backup device. If it works well enough, this could be well positioned. Home users are just starting to realize how much they need to care about backups. If it's really plug-n-play when combined with Time Machine, they might have a good lever to crack open that market.

iTunes Movie Rentals: Renting movies (both regular and HD) via iTunes. Personally I'm not a fan of rentals, I'm not a fan of DRM, and I'm not a fan of proprietary technology. So I'm not excited about this in a lot of ways. However I think it's the right move in the market. It will be very interesting to see how many rentals they sell.

AppleTV Take Two: Refresh of the set-top box that brings iTunes, iPhoto, and other things to your AV system. It's a very nice system, and integrates a lot of cool pieces. But I think that's the problem -- most people have some portion of these features on their DVRs or other tools. Without actually offering a DVR I think it'll be a tough sell. And they're probably going to run into annoying download problems, especially with people on slower DSL connections.

iPhone software upgrades: Some very good incremental upgrades here. The movable home icons are fantastic but also a no-brainer, especially with 3rd-party apps coming before long. The win will come from the position locator. If that works well people will love it. (A loss would come from the stability of the upgrade.)

iPod Touch upgrade: Some nice features that should have been in the original Touch. The $20 cost to upgrade will be a shock for most users. I suspect they'll not sell a bunch of upgrades, meaning they're now dealing with two versions of the software.

Just my initial take. I haven't used or downloaded anything yet. Maybe soon!