One of many things that happened this past week while I was completely insane with other things was the semi-annual MacWorld expo. Apple had a few announcements, so I’ll take ‘em one at a time.
MacBook Air: I’ve been asking for a miniBook for almost two years now, so this was the one I was most looking forward to. In many ways, this is exactly what I wanted. In many other ways…not so much. On the plus side, it’s nice and small, with a 13.3 widescreen display. That’s actually larger than I need…personally, I think if you’re gonna go small, you should really go small, and an 11″ screen is plenty. But since the overall unit is still nice and compact, the larger screen is cool nonetheless. I love that it’s light, and I love that it has a full-size keyboard despite its size.
On the negative side, you’ve got just one USB port, which kind of sucks. I have two on my MacBook Pro, and they’re both hooked up to hubs. What people tend to forget is that USB is not some magical port bus that you can just endlessly daisychain. Particularly on macs, you’re gonna run into problems if you overload that bus. Keep in mind that on all other Mac laptops, the built-in mouse and keyboard are already using one of those ports, so anything you add to it is just sucking more bandwidth up on top of it (this is why traditionally one port on mac laptops is more reliable than the other). Having only the one port means that your portable mouse had better be Bluetooth or else you’re going to have to swap out between the mouse and an iPod or portable hard drive or whatever else you carry with you. I also miss the lack of an optical drive, although admittedly I use mine less and less when I travel these days. What it comes down to is this: the MacBook Air is a pretty awesome secondary computer, but it’s too underpowered (particularly the graphics card…ick) to act as any sort of desktop replacement. Had I $1,800 to blow, I’d love one of these. But I’m pretty satisfied with my current MacBook Pro desktop/laptop arrangement at the moment.
- iTunes Movie Rentals: No surprises here. It’s exactly as limited as I expected. Not being able to rent HD for anything other than Apple TV is weird, but whatever.
- New Apple TV: It’s definitely a step in the right direction, but it’s still a very limited device. It still offers nothing that I can’t do with the multimedia functions of my 360, and that has a totally kickass music visualizer and an HD-DVD drive. Apple really needs to put a Blu-ray drive in this thing to bring it to the next level.
- New iPhone/iPod Touch apps: Good all around. No games yet, which is baffling, but again, it’s a step in the right direction. The touch is still the iPod of my dreams, but I won’t even consider getting one until they release a model with dramatically better battery life and ten times the hard drive space. But once they reach that milestone, I’m there.
All in all, not a bad MacWorld. I’m still waiting for Apple to fully embrace Blu-ray (they’re on the board…come on already!) and hopefully there’s an iPod refresh coming later this year, but still, encouraging stuff.