MacBook Air: A few more tidbits have surfaced on the Air. You can boot from a disc in a remote optical drive, which had concerned some people in our forums. It's made by Quanta. It's not the lightest laptop on the market, USA Today wants you to know. (But it's got a huge advantage over the rest anyway: It's a Mac.) And despite the environmental considerations in its design, those whiners at Greenpeace still need attention aren't satisfied.
iTunes Movie Rentals: Deemed "mostly awesome" by MacNewsWorld. And if you're hung up on that 24-hour time limit, TUAW has a workaround: Rent them in the future, watch them in the present. Whoa.
Mac Expo Product Roundup: Check out the winners of the Best in Show Awards. And these all look interesting as well: the Otterbox iPhone Defender, the XtremeMac Luna X2 (successor to the already-pretty-sweet Luna), the Griffin WindowSeat windshield mount for the iPhone, the release of Microsoft Office 2008, and of course AirMail, the MacBook Air sleeve that looks like -- wait for it -- a manila envelope. And if you're in a rush, you can see the whole South Hall in 2:51 with this vertigo-inducing (but in a good way) MacLife.com video.
Cool Announcements: EA announced Spore for the Mac, due later this year. The brainchild of Will Wright, creator of The Sims, it lets you create a whole universe, evolve life, build civilizations, and more. Intuit plans to overhaul Quicken for Mac into Quicken Financial Life for Mac. And Google will bring Picasa to the Mac in 2008.
Shocking Gossip: On the show floor, Steve Jobs was rude to the always-charming Violet Blue, which really isn't cool. And here's Violet's unrelated Open Source Sex column "So, I Seduced a Mac Geek."
Random Newsy Nuggets: You can download the keynote from the iTunes Store for free (it's 1.21GB). The New York Times interviewed Steve Jobs, who said Americans no longer read and Bill Gates should be honored, among other observations. Time Warner plans to experiment with pricing its high-speed Internet service based on how much data you download. The Macalope does a splendid job of explaining why the iPod touch update costs $20. And should Apple buy TiVo so it can strong-arm NBC?
imagine engine
January 18, 2008 at 8:04am
Why hasn't there been a lawsuit over Apple announcing on their site and advertisements prior to Leopard's release that Time Machine would allow backup over WLAN to a network hard drive(s). Several customers purchased not only OS X Leopard but also the Airport Extreme Base Station and an external hard drive based on this false advertising only to find out they pulled the feature just prior to releasing the product. Though continually Apple admitted it was due to technical reasons that they were aware of but the bug was being worked on. Now Steve Jobs announces at the 2008 keynote speech that Apple's solution for this was to release Time Capsule (all in one router with hard drive). When I open Time Machine I notice that it doesn't see the network hard drive. Though if I use a third party solution such as iTimeMachine then Time Machine is able to now see the external drive connected to the WLAN via Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station and actually work. I smell a scam here with Apple wanting to make even more profits so they disabled Time Machine for use over WLAN only to sell Time Capsule.
Frank
January 18, 2008 at 12:47pm
I would say that 99% of the lawsuits that are filed against Apple are stupid and usually filed by people who weren't mislead but simply didn't read the info that was available and instead made assumptions. This is one instance that is different and I would sign on to this lawsuit as a plaintiff.
Anonymous
January 18, 2008 at 5:47am
So, what? I'm not carrying a disc with me everywhere I roam. It would be better if MBA could boot from a flash drive.
Frank
January 17, 2008 at 5:11pm
That Time Warner story is the worst news I've heard about the Internet in a long time. Who in the heck wants to try to figure out how much they download per month and I just love how they want to charge an overage fee, like cell phones where if you go over by 100 minutes you pay more than you would have paid for the plan that would have doubled your minutes. Why don't they simply move you to the next monthly plan???
Also, what the heck was the article talking about with 5Mbits, 10Mbits, 20Mbits, or 40Mbits??? My modem downloads the max of those in 4 seconds of downloading a file. Does anyone know the real amounts we're talking about here???
This would seriously be like going back to the days when CompuServe was in its prime and we paid by the minute for our usage. We are so beyond that. Heck, the cell phone companies are actually starting to have to actually honor their claims of "unlimited" usage in some places.
The bottom line, I'm a programmer by trade and there is no way I'm going to sit here and track my downloads when using the Internet. What a pain in the arse. If my cable company ever went that route I would get my service from somewhere else, immediately.
Frank
Anonymous
January 18, 2008 at 6:00am
"We are sorry, TimeWarner has determined that you have exceeded your monthly download limit, please pay $3.00 to complete downloading of your file."
"Could we interest you in our $100 per month, Platinum Premium Ultra-user Mega-bueno plan? (Current monthly charges are not indicative of future payments.)"
I certainly hope that I do not qualify for TW's special service.
