Macworld 2008 afterthoughts

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

With Macworld 2008 wrapping up, I thought I’d touch on some of the announcements made this year. I took the week off hoping to go to Macworld again this year but no such luck. Somethings came up, good stuff which I’ll touch base with in a future post, so I couldn’t make it this year. So like millions of other geeks, I loaded up my browser tabs with as much coverage as I could. Which didn’t go as well as planned. Iphonealley’s Ustream didn’t work out, Twitter buckled under the pressure and even Engadget had its share of hiccups. Macrumors was once again the winner with up to the minute coverage.

Macbook Air

Lets start with the biggest announcement, the Macbook Air. New ultra-portable laptop that falls in between a Macbook and a Macbook Pro. Well, first off, I’m sure it’s a gorgeous piece of hardware (I haven’t seen one up close yet) but I’m just not the target market for this product. If maybe I had a Mac Pro or even an iMac as my main computer, the MBA would be a nice on the go laptop but thats not the case. So I’m going to pass on this one.

Time Capsule

Now something that is right up my alley is the new Time Capsule. Since upgrading to Leopard I haven’t had a backup. Superduper isn’t compatible with Leopard yet and my only external drive is a 120GB WD Passport that’s too small for Time Machine to work. I’ve wanted an Apple Airport Extreme for sometime now but never made a move due to have a rev 1 Macbook which didn’t include 802.11n. I’ll probably opt for the 500GB one as I only have my Macbook to back up and 500GB should be plenty. As soon as they are available, I’ll be picking one up.

Apple TV and Movie Rentals

While iTunes movie rentals is no big surprise, the fact they have all major studios on board and HD movies was. I’m all for renting movies and I think Apple will do fairly well. Unfortunately I think only the people with AppleTV’s will really use this. Watching a movie on my iPhone or iPod just doesn’t appeal to me. When I had my AppleTV i loved it. The only reason I sold it was my HDTV died and I wasn’t planning on getting another one right away. I think once I get another HDTV, I’ll pick up a AppleTV again. The software update was nice and the ability to run without the need for a computer is epic.

All the rest

It seemed to be very quiet otherwise at Macworld this year. The iPhone update nice but expected. I would have liked to see something about the iPhone SDK that’s being released next month. Eye-Fi announced iPhoto support. Too bad my camera uses XD cards. Office 2008 was released which is finally a Universal Binary. I installed it this morning and its a nice upgrade to 2004. Other than that, I didn’t hear anything else that really caught my attention, well except a rumor than Panic is working on blogging software!