Only the Size of My Head

Macworld has come and gone and it’s time to take a look at my predictions and see how well I did:

• A new ultra-slim (but non-sub) notebook “Macbook Air”: Check
  • 13 inch, LED screen.
    • Check
  • Penryn based, 2.2 or 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU.
    • I guessed too high here and it’s miniaturized Conroe based. It’s a pity that, miniaturized Penryn would have been most excellent.
  • Solid state drive: 64 or 32Gb.
    • Only partially correct since Apple surprised me by having a hard drive option. Cost is really the killer on this one.
  • 14 hour battery life.
    • Yeah, don’t I wish. Personally the 5 hour battery life on the Air, particularly since the battery is non-user replaceable strikes me as a little low. I’d gladly have taken an extra half pound of weight for a denser battery.
  • No optical drive, no Apple-branded external drive.
    • No optical, check, but there is the unneccessarily crippled external drive option; why restrict it to be Air exclusive? That’s just dumb. I can only surmise that Apple really doesn’t want to sell these.
  • Wireless only internet (802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, possibly AT&T wireless).
    • Check, minus the AT&T wireless.
      
  • 3 USB ports, 1 Firewire 400, no Firewire 800 (possibly no Firewire at all).
    • Again, I wish. While I was correct about no Firewire, I did expect at least two USB ports.
  • Multitouch trackpad opens some new options, but nothing too radical.
    • Check
  • $1700
    • “And the actual showcase price is $1,799″ - I was damned close
  • “Most beautiful, lightest Mac ever”
    • Nope
  • “Unbelievably thin”
    • Check
  • Shipping mid-late February, units on display at Macworld.
    • Check
• New Macbook Pro, simple speed bump with Penryn chips. Possibly Macbook updates as well, but I doubt it.
  • No mention of the Macbook Pro at all (probably to avoid stealing Air’s thunder), I was surprised.
• New displays add built-in iSight, drop prices, increased panel quality.
  • Nope, although damn it all they should have been updated. Apple displays are really falling behind the market (although that’s not uncommon).
• Microsoft Office ‘08 demo. Many thanks to MS for making a new, universal binary version of Office.
  • Thanks to Microsoft, check, but no demo.
• Statement about how X% of all (important) applications are now universal binaries, “transition to Intel now truly complete.”
  • Not in so many words. He did say that all the major apps are not Intel native however.
• Statement about the adoption rate of Leopard, “our best OS ever, with the fastest adoption rate ever.” Making fun of Vista.
  • Check, but without the Vista bashing.
    
• Statement about market penetration of iTunes, iPod and iPhone. “And we’re just getting started.”
  • Didn’t happen, although some of the market penetration numbers for the iPhone were given.
• No iPhone 3G, but new firmware (possibly demoed). Possible iPhone memory bump to match iPod Touch.
  • Check on the firmware & demo, no iPhonespec bumps however.
    
• iPhone SDK mentioned, give timeline, talk about how cool it is, but no deep in-depth demo (will wait until WWDC for that)
  • Check
• Major iTunes video related announcements. Video rentals (48 hours, $3.50) with all major studios on-board. New television content, variable pricing, NBC possibly back on-board (doubt it). Video quality of all iTunes videos will be increased, previously purchased videos can be upgraded for $2.
  • Movie rentals, with all major studios, but with only 24 hours and the pricing is $2.99 and $3.99 (for library & new releases respectively, I guessed in the middle). I was a little surprised at the lack of mention of any changes to the television content available. Apple obviously wants to repeat their music dominance in video and television would seem like an important thing to stress as available when on the subject.
• All iTunes tracks go DRM free with increased audio quality.
  • Sadly didn’t happen, hopefully soon.
    
• Announcement of new music deals with Indy music studios.
  • Didn’t happen
    
• Announcement of timeline for Beatles music on iTunes.
  • Also didn’t happen
    
• AppleTV update, new version is both an update of the original AppleTV and adds Airport Extreme features to make it a true digital hub. Sadly no DVR features.
  • Semi-check. I was right that there is an updated AppleTV and that the update would be fundamentally just an upgrade of the existing AppleTV software (making it backwards compatible with the Rev 1 AppleTV), but the Airport Extreme features I predicted ended up being rolled into a different product alltogether: Time Capsule.
• Biggest Macworld ever, “thank you”
  • Nope
• Sadly no Newton 2.0/Tablet announcement, yet.
  • Check
• “Boom!”
  • Check
• “One more thing”
  • Oddly no, no last minute surprise

Overall I was surprised at how close I was on a lot of the predictions. As for my reactions to the announcements, well:

I’ll be very curious to see how well the Air does on the market. My initial reaction to it is that it is a beautiful piece of engineering, a technical triumph, but more of a proof of concept than a commercial product. I understand the need to compromise when you’re working on a form factor like the Air, but I’m not sure that all the compromises made were well chosen.

The Air actually reminds me a lot of the old G4 Cube, both share exquisite design, but also a lack of ports, power and upgrade-ability while retaining a steep price. The Air’s non-user replaceable battery (even if it is easy to replace) also strikes me as a real sticking point. While the Cube was a commercial failure, only time will tell how the Air will fair.

In regards to the other keynote announcements, I think they’ve being unfairly underplayed (mostly because everyone is so distracted by the Air).

Apple is obviously pushing the video front very hard and doing a pretty good job of it too. The refinements to the AppleTV make it a considerably more appealing product that fits in nicely with the iTunes music, movies & TV eco-system. Add a larger HD (300 gig minimum) and iPod syncing to the AppleTV and it could be the all-in-one home media center.

The movie rentals are an excellent addition to iTunes for Apple, primarily because they give Apple a foot in the door and build on Apple’s relationships with other companies. Personally I prefer owning my movies, but from what I’ve seen the rental system is intuitive, relatively extensive and a fantastic start on another digital media monopoly for Apple.

The iPhone firmware increases the functionality of the iPhone by adding several attractive and useful features. With iPhone sales already being phenomenal (although Apple really needs to get Rev 2 hardware out the door soon) these new features can’t but help push more iPhones at retail.

And finally Time Capsule. Perhaps the least glitzy of the keynote announcements, it is none the less the one that I am most interested in owning personally. As someone who wants good wireless access at home and who has rigged his old Powerbook up to be the gateway to a 500 Gb family content & backup server, the thought of consolidating three pieces of equipment (Airport Express station, Powerbook and external hard drive) into one is appealing. My one wish related to TC would be that Apple make it easy for owners of the previous Airport Extreme stations to do fundamentally the same thing, albeit with an external drive. That feature was initially promised by Leopard, I’d like to see it delivered.

Overall I think all of the keynote announcements were fundamentally good for Apple and I’ll be curious to see how each of the products does in the market. It’s going to be interesting year.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Apple, Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.