MacWorld 2008 Begins - Keynote to Insight Hemmoraging amongst Apple Fans

So I'm excited, are you excited?! I'M SO EXCITED!!! Soon, Steve Jobs will don his black turtle neck and begin speaking to his loyal worshipers of the Apple. What shall the Mac Gods bestow upon us today? Insanely skinny multi-touch tablets? 80GB iPod Touch? The iHouse? iChips directly connected to my iBrain?! We shall find out soon. Stay tuned, I'll update this post with all the juicy details as they're released.

UPDATE: Steve announces Time Machine compliment: Time Capsule. Basically Time Machine is great for desktop machines, but horrible for laptops. Time Capsule is essentially the same thing, but done wirelessly. Neat.

It's actually a wireless hard drive. It looks like an Airport Extreme but with more ports in the back. Two models: 500GB and 1TB. (GEEZ!) $299, $499.

UPDATE: New iPhone features:
Maps with locations, webclips, customizable home screens, SMS multiple people at once, chapters, subtitles, and language support in video, and lyrics support in audio.

iPhone SDK to be released in February. HOLY CRAP!

Tons of other features for the iPhones, cool stuff. Rearranging icons. Maps demo now -- page curls up, search and directions buttons now -- if you've seen the 1.1.3 demo vids, this is exactly it. "Schoom. And there we are." as it locates Steve in the Moscone. "I can flip right into directions, and it uses my current location to start..." calculating the route back.

Really super accurate GPS. Customizable Home Screen.

UPDATE: iTunes. Movie Rentals, including HD. $2.99 for old movies, $3.99 for new movies. Also, Apple TV getting a bit of an update. Rent directly from AppleTV only a dollar more. No computer needed anymore. Pretty cool.

Movies stream directly to you so the movies you rent you can watch IMMEDIATELY.

HD Podcasts. Also HD Music Videos. Steve's very excited about the amount of HD stuff they've got.

AppleTV reduced to $229. Effective today.

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT. THE MACBOOK AIR. It's tiny. REALLY tiny. It's the thinnest, lightest laptop in the world. Seriously, HOLY CRAP. This thing is TINY. At it's widest point it's .76 inches thick. At it's thinnest point... .16 INCHES!! It's so thin you can fit it inside a vanilla envelope. He puts it in it!



BRAIN SPLODE!!! It’s an LED backlit display that’s instant-on. It also has a built-in iSight camera, and a full-sized keyboard. Backlit too, with a trackpad and multi-touch gesture support on the trackpad.

Intel Core 2 Duo Inside, 1.6 GHz standard, with a 1.8GHz upgrade available. Apple asked Intel to shrink their Core 2 Duo processors down to a package 60% smaller in order to fit it inside the MacBook Air. And here’s Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini to talk about it.



While browsing the web, the battery has about a 5 hour life. It has a solid state hard drive. No optical drive whatsoever. But it has the Time Capsule, Movie Rentals and even has a special new feature called Remote Drive. It can literally borrow the optical drive of another computer on the same wireless network and install things that requite an optical drive, remotely. Impressive.

$1799. Ships in two weeks, you can pre-order it now.

Apple Proves They Rock All Over Again

As I'm sure you've heard, Apple announced the release of a complete revamp of the iPod selection. The Shuffle got some new, earth tone colors, as well as the (PRODUCT)red version. The nanos are now the short, fat kid of the bunch. And the original style of iPods were renamed iPod classic and got a few changes including being slighter thinner, new colors, and a new 160 GB version for $350.

To everyone's delight they also announced the iPod Touch, which is very literally an iPhone minus the phone. (Not to mention certain very desirable applications.) Needless to say, everyone was extremely excited about the iPod touch.

Oh, but Steve wasn't done wooing the crowd just yet. Oh no, he also unveiled an incredible $200 price drop for the 8 GB iPhone, and the demise of the 4 GB iPhone. ($300 while supplies last) There was a huge applause at this last announcement. However, within minutes after the Jobs Worship was over, people quickly realized that there were millions of people who had waited days to get their iPhone on opening day and had dished out $600 to do so. And well all know Apples' strict return policy of only 10 days. So what about that poor sap who bought his 11 days ago? Well, Steve Jobs wants to please everyone. In a surprise move to everyone, Steve issued an open letter to all iPhone users earlier this morning. As it turns out, he's received thousands of angry letters about the drastic, and sudden price drop in the iPhone. He decided, after much deliberation, that the return policy will stand. However, all of the early adopters of the iPhone are now rewarded with a $100 Apple store credit to anything in the store!

Now, maybe it's just me, but I'm not really into adopting new technologies early in their life. I've seen things like this happen far too often than not. But for the CEO of a huge company like Apple to come out and say, 'Okay, I hear your cries. Here's what we're gonna do...' is absolutely unheard of in the tech business. I'm not a mac user currently, but after a move like this coupled with my growing hatred for everything Microsoft, I'm seriously considering completely changing over to Mac only. iMac, here I come!

Neat Idea for iPhone Contact Photos

I recently signed up for a biweekly newsletter called Photojojo. It's a neat little newsletter that talks about photo manipulation and neat things you can do with photos, etc. Anyway, I recently found a neat way to show your contacts if your one of the insane cool people who can afford an iPhone. Check it out here at Stillframe's Flickr account. Also, check out some of the neat things they have at Photojojo, you just might be interested.

DRM-Free Music On iTunes: Awesome?

In one of the best most confusing moves for the consumer the music industry has ever done, EMI in conjunction with Apple has announced today that they will be releasing DRM-Free music on iTunes for $0.30 more. This most certainly comes as a complete surprise to most of us and is definitely a welcome step in the right direction for moving towards a completely DRM-free world.

However, one has to ask: Why would they make such a seemingly selfless move like this? They obvious answer seems to be that they would make more money, seeing as how they are charging a quarter and a nickel more per DRM-free song. But I have a few issues with this.

One of which is that the DRM-free songs are still in the AAC format. Most devices play primarily MP3 and OGG Vorbis. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that means only iPods can play these songs still. So all of those folks out there sporting their iRiver, Zune, Creative, and Sandisk players won't be able to even take advantage of these DRM-free songs. Hmmm, that stinks.

Another issue I have is that they are charging more for the DRM-free songs. Media is media, it's the same song, is it not? DVD Music, SACDs and CDs all cost the exact same, why must we now pay MORE for DRM-free, slightly higher quality music?

And lastly is the oh-so-interesting fact that TV shows and movies are not DRM-free as well. If Mr. Jobs and EMI truly supported this DRM-free movement, then why wouldn't Jobs push for DRM-free Disney movies (and all of the subsidiary companies therein, e.g. Pixar, ABC, Touchstone, Miramax, etc). Keep in mind that Jobs owns a considerable amount of shares in The Walt Disney Company and is one of the senior members on the Board Of Directors.

All in all, I think this is most certainly a move in the right direction, but at the moment, it seems that the rights of the consumer are skewed in the eyes of the big wigs in charge of the record labels. Here's hoping for a DRM-free world that is that much closer to a reality!

Offical Annoucement Here