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By Alex Gasparski - Editor-In-Chief As many of you already know, Steve Jobs' keynote at the opening of the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco, CA was on Tuesday. Traditionally, it is always accompanied by many new product announcements and unveilings. Last year it was the iPhone and this year's keynote has been surrounded with speculation (but probably mostly wishes), but a day or so before the keynote, there was lots of talk in the blogosphere about a new Apple ultra-portable laptop called the MacBook Air. We now that the keynote has ended and MacWorld is currently underway, the all new Apple MacBook Air has been unveiled and is the latest product from Apple that everyone (and I mean everyone) is talking about. I just wanted to talk a little bit about it and a few other of Apple's announcements made at Macworld 2008. 
To start off, the MacBook Air looks amazing, I mean absolutely stunning. It's less than 1" thick and weighs only 3 pounds! Anyone who is a frequent traveler would love to have it. The aesthetics of thing thing is totally unbelievable...I have to hand it to Apple for making another visually amazing product. However, with that being said, there are many things about it that will definitely turn some people off. One of which is the very high price tag. The solid-state 64GB version costs almost $3100, which is way too much for most consumers, but luckily there is a PATA version, which uses the same slim hard drives in the iPod's, costing $1800 for 80GB. The benefit of the solid-state drive is much better battery life, but with the $3000 price tag vs. $1800, I have a feeling most will opt for the PATA version until solid-state drive prices come down. Next, the MacBook Air doesn't have an optical drive, which I can understand because it had to be omitted to make it as slim as possible, but the optional SuperDrive disc drive that connects via USB works only with the MacBook Air. That's right...you have to buy a specific model of Apple's external SuperDrive to use with the MacBook Air. And if that wasn't enough, the SuperDrive will take up the only USB port on the device, so if you want to plug in anything else, you are out of luck. There's also a lack of an Ethernet port on the MacBook Air too, only Wi-Fi. This probably won't be a big issue for the majority since many laptop users have access to Wi-Fi, but I have to believe that it was frustrate some. Lastly, the battery is completely unremovable inside the device, so you cannot swap out batteries when you're running low, which really I think is the biggest downside to it. All in all, I think the MacBook Air is a perfectly good 1st generation product, but I expect (and hope) to see additions and some more fine-tuning to it in the near future, so if you can hold out and wait for the 2nd generation, I would. Steve Jobs also announced that the iPhone's standard application set is coming to the iPod Touch, which is great news since many (including myself) have "jailbroken" their iPod Touch's to get the apps as well as other customizable features. However, there's a huge caveat....it will cost current iPod Touch owners $20. Now excuse me but I know I'm not the only person who thinks charging a fee for something that Apple had to do no work to move to applications from iPhone to iPod. People who have hacked their iPod Touch's simply took the iPhone's apps (weather, mail, stocks, notes, maps) and simply copied the files to their iPod and it all worked, so we know there is no coding that has to take place to bring them to the iPod. But I'll probably end up paying for it because I really don't need my iPod jailbroken anymore because I don't really use any addition 3rd party apps and the ones I do, I can wait to get them when the SDK comes out in late February and applications start appearing shortly after. I do hope that Apple will see the light and scrap the fee and refund the customers who pay for the upgrade (because I'll be one of them.) There was also some updates to the iTunes Music Store, including the ability to rent movies, is a welcomed feature, but mail-order DVD renters, like myself via Netflix, will not really find any use of it. Google Maps on the iPhone and iPod Touch got some updates, including the ability to use a pseudo-GPS that uses the cell towers to estimate your current location on the iPhone, and various Wi-Fi access points on the iPod Touch. It's definitely no where near as accurate as GPS, but it works in lieu for now I guess. The AppleTV got an interface update as well as some HD functionality with the new iTunes Music Store update. In the end, this years Macworld keynote was pretty good as usual, both with its upsides and downsides....but oh well, what can we do. Apple continues to be on the frontline of innovation and leaves competitors (cough Microsoft cough) trying to place catch up.
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