Well, I couldn’t get up at 4am… seriously, I didn’t even try. But I am going to watch the keynote stream a little later today with a fellow Mac fan. My post this time last year was called Macworld for Americans because the products being released were not available to Australians – guess what, similar this year.
These initial notes are from wandering through apple.com; haven’t looked at the blogs yet and as I said, haven’t seen the keynote. So I’ll likely make another post today, with some further commentary. This post may also be corrected through the day.
The Apple secret machine seems to be getting a little rusty (or maybe it’s deliberate), as the MacBook Air was a foregone conclusion. Am I disappointed that I bought a bog-standard MacBook recently? Nup. ‘cause the Air is really not a full computer – it’s a traveller’s companion. The important thing about this product is the option of a solid-state drive (SSD).
Pricing:
| Model | US | AU | Markup1 | AU EDU2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1.6GHz 80GB HD | $1799 | $2499 | 23% | $2349 |
| 1.8GHz 64GB SSD | $3098 | $4338 | 24% | $4004.50 |
iPhone update – N/A for Oz. No 3G; still no mention of an Australian release date.
iTouch gets a touch up (bad pun, it’s early and I haven’t eating breakfast) – yawn from me.
Also a poorly kept secret, Apple will now rent movies through the iTunes store. Watchable on an Apple TV. The Apple TV, as far as I can tell, has not really been updated, except with this capability. So, I was wrong, Apple are going to continue to focus the box on using their content.
Time Capsule. Time Machine shipped with Leopard, but one feature that disappeared from the developer’s builds, was the ability to connect to network drives or even to a drive connected to Apple’s wireless router. It seems that Apple couldn’t make it work, and so pulled the feature. Big disappointment for me, as that was my plan for backing up two Macs. I could buy a USB drive, connect it to the iMac and have all Time Machine backups go through it. Apple’s solution is Time Capsule – to me, this really seems like a band aid, that’s been spun into a product. They couldn’t get it working across all sorts of equipment, so they made one piece of equipment that lots of people will buy for the convenience of wireless backups.
Time Capsule is a wireless router with a 500Gb or 1TB drive built-in which will allow all Macs in a house to use for Time Machine. It’s using 802.11n (draft). You know, I’ll probably buy one – it will work seamlessly with the two Macs, allow us to use Time Machine, I can connect the printer to it for sharing (rather than through the iMac), and faster wireless.
| Model | $US | $AU | Markup1 | $AU EDU2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500GB | $299 | $429 | 27% | $399 |
| 1TB | $499 | $699 | 24% | $679 |
1 Markup based on 1 AUD = 0.883134 USD via xe.com
2 EDU – Australian individual education pricing is only available to people who quality, like me 