Thoughts on MacWorld 2008
MacBook Air: Very thin. You could probably stack two of these on top of each other and get the thickness of my Dell. That’s really really nice. So is the use of Solid State Drives, meaning there’s no moving parts. The multitouch touchpad (or is that multitouch pad?) looks nice too, the zooming of photos using it is really cool. But WTF, no user replaceable battery? That’s a bad idea in a laptop, because laptop batteries often need to be replaced.
Verdict: Sweet 
iPod Touch / iPhone Updates: Good updates, and it’s promising to hear there’s an SDK coming out. But WTF, why is it $20 to upgrade the software on the iPod Touch? I know most of Apple’s user base will pay that anyway, but it’s still a little bit stupid. Maybe if enough people complain they might give it out for free.
Verdict: A bit silly.
Time Capsule: Blatant ripoff of Windows Home Server. However it won’t work as well, because it’s (primarily) using wireless networking. You can’t have several computers backing themselves up over wireless at once, it will be slow as hell! Even when using the draft-N standard, it’s still no substitute for the speed of a wired network.
Plus, your Time Capsule won’t automatically back up Windows-based PCs that you have on your network as well, it will only backup Macs automatically. Sure you can still copy stuff onto it, but you won’t get nice automatic backups. If you had a Windows Home Server, you could back up your Windows PCs automatically, and use it as a storage device for Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine feature. End result, all of your computers are backed up.
On second thoughts, though Time Capsule steals a lot of Windows Home Server’s best features (primarily automatic backups), it’s still only an Airport Extreme with a single cheap terabyte hard disk inside it. Steve Jobs believes it’s a "server-grade" hard disk, but I’ll believe that when I see one…taken apart….
Verdict: Lame.
Black turtleneck and jeans: As expected
–Ben
