So that’s what that smell was…
Ah the keynote. Yesterday I really missed working in an office with Thomas and Kris and other Apple/techno-philes because we’d usually gather around someone’s computer, or we’d each have a liveblog up on our machines, trading shouts of “No way!” over the cubicle walls. With no one around fueling my fervor, I didn’t even log into the sites when it started. I grabbed some lunch, started working on the day’s Sudoku puzzle and then about 30 mins into it I started checking out what the sites were saying. I did have James sending me some IMs and I tried to bug Gregory, who knew nothing about the keynote, but beyond that nada. Later on I bugged Fredo for a bit, then Kris and I chatted. Twitter was pretty silent during it, however it also seemed to go down at the same time, so I’m sure there were many people trying to send Apple related tweets in that never saw the light of day.
Anyway, in case you were under a rock or just didn’t care, Apple finally revealed what was “in the air” yesterday. Along with an update to the iPhone and iPod Touch, he announced a few new products, one of them being the MacBook Air which is more or less what people have been chomping at the bit for for a while now.
My reaction to it was very similar to my reaction to the iPhone. That is the future. I definitely want to see one up close and in person, but there was this horrifying realization that if I wanted to, I could just buy it… with cash! Well, debit card, but still. It ships in 2 weeks, but hopefully it’ll be in stores for ogling pretty soon. I’ll bug my friend that works for Big Temptation to let me know when I can shoulder check my way through the fanboys and put my greasy fingers on one. 😀
Now to turn it around and show some link love for the comic book geeks/lovers out there. Gallery 1988: LA is currently hosting Under the Influence: A Tribute to Stan Lee. There is some amazing, uncanny, fantastic, strange and incredible — see what I did there? — artwork on display and for sale. Excelsior!
I’ve been waiting for this announcement for several years. If it was all that and a bag of chips, I was willing to sell my HD Widescreen monitor, my mac mini and everything else, and buy one of these as my primary machine.
But, like with a lot of things, seeing it it is not as satisfying as wanting it.
I’m not impressed, especially when it comes to how much it will cost to be an early adopter.
I’m still more excited about the possibilities of the ASUS eeePC.
While it would never be my primary machine, I love the idea of low cost, hackable UMPC’s.
Of course, I will still trek to my nearest apple store in Tampa to see one, just to confirm my curmudgeonly prognostication.
Yes when I saw it, I was filled with gadget lust, and now that’s cooled off a bit. A few things I don’t like are the lack of a replaceable battery. I have an iphone and ipods and when the batteries inevitably go kaput, it’s going to cost me money to have them replaced instead of being able to order it myself? That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Still, it is lighter than any machine I have (aside from my iphone and ipods) and would easily replace my laptop for in-home use. However something I’ve noticed since having an iPhone is that as much as I love it, freely available wifi is not as prevalent as they would like you to believe. And as much as I love my accessibility, I can’t afford monthly fees to pay for internet through all of the various provider so that I can hop on around town. So the lack of a dedicated ethernet cable port is a bit rough as well. They have an accessory, but so far as I’ve seen it isn’t included, which is just plain stupid.
When I visited the family for the holidays, my parents have wifi, so I wasn’t completely cut off, but it would be nice to have a machine I could use to perform actual tasks beyond checking e-mail and wifi. I love my iPhone, but I can’t port web development apps over to it. 🙂
Yeah, they would want you to think that free Wi-Fi was in the air, like oxygen. Around every street corner is a unicorn, a fluffy bunny and free internet access.
In their zeal to make the Mac Book Air self-contained, they pretty much made everything highly inaccessible. Seems like you’d have to crack the stupid thing open like a walnut to do such crazy things as replace the battery, up the RAM or increase the HDD capacity.
Maybe we both should wait for 2nd generation.
This happens right after I buy a standard MacBook. The one I bought suits my needs ok, and I’m not the early adopter type. Plus, it’s not in my budget. I’ll probably take a look at one the next time I’m at the Apple Store and drool and do the “Oooooh…. Aaaaaaah.”
In addition to the Air, they’re going to foist the Time Capsule upon us. It’s a scam, because you can easily get a 500GB or 1TB drive at Costco, and Leopard’s Time Machine function will reconfigure the drive for back-up. The only issue is the Time Capsules are wireless, but other external hard drives aren’t.
I’m surprised Apple hasn’t tried to use Al Green’s “Here I Am, Baby (Come and Take Me).” They should have, considering how sudden this Air seems.