Well, Stevemas has come and gone, leaving in its wake, a load of new stuff. Probably the biggest announcement was the Macbook Air, a transitional laptop between the Macbook and the Macbook Pro, hailed as “the world’s thinnest notebook”. It makes the last generation of ultraportables look obese by comparison and features a few never before seen innovations. The first of these being the reduced size processor, which is the same chip, but put onto a smaller board allowing Apple to squeeze Intels Core 2 Duo at speeds of 1.6 or 1.8 ghz. The second real innovation in the Macbook Air is the trackpad, allowing a greater multitouch interface with the OS. Third, and probably the most important of the lot, is that the Air doesn’t have an optical drive, just a small 1.8″ hard disk, meaning it’s the first Apple in over a decade not to have one on board. The ingenuity in this design choice is that the Air comes with a disk that allows any computer (pc or mac) to share its CD or DVD drive with the Macbook Air. The full specs of the computer can be seen at Apples site

 

Next down the line in importance was iTunes movie rentals, coupled with the Apple TV (take 2). Apple took on Netflix, Amazon and LoveFilm, getting all the major film studios together in one easy lump for people to throw money at. They also added a nicer firmware for the Apple TV, so it can now work independently of a computer, but can also be synced if necessary. HD rentals through iTunes really made this important, it seemed quite odd for apple to be throwing that out there. It’s only available over the Apple TV, so it may just be a trial (or they just don’t have the bandwidth to supply everyone with HD). 

 

Time Capsule has to be the best storage option for under £1000, with 802.11N on board as well as gigabit ethernet and a 500GB or 1TB drive, it is being sold as a companion product to compliment Time Machine in Leopard, but it will work with any mac since Panther as an Airport Disk.

 Also available as of the keynote are the 1.1.3 update for the iPhone and an application add on pack for the iPod Touch was available to test iTunes as a platform for selling software (for the upcoming SDK)

 

Filed under: Apple