Apple Makes The Funnest Toys

And now for your regularly scheduled Apple/Macintosh commercial. In case you missed it, today was the Macworld Expo keynote address by Steve Jobs, usually a highly anticipated event for big profile product launches and introductions. The iPhone bowed at last year’s event (though it wouldn’t be available for another six months).

I’m most excited about the The Time Capsule which is basically Apple’s foray into the network storage game; as usual, they’re not just dropping another generic product into a field of relatively indistinguishable generic products. It’s both a network storage drive and a wireless router and it works seamlessly with Time Machine/Bonjour. I’m kinda geeked. As it is, I’m a huge nerd for backups and whatnot, and I’m thinking this is quite cool in that regard. I still think an off-site backup is also critical in the event of catastrophe… but I’m tempted to get this (eventually) as a redundancy.

I’m second most excited about the new AppleTV thingy. Way, way better concept than the original, and far more likely to sell than their initial offering. Combined with the whole movie rental thingy, it could conceivably be an iPod-like paradigm-breaker for television. It is, at the very least, conceivable that I could replace a whole lot of home entertainment hardware with that guy, and possibly turn off my satellite service to boot. Maybe not quite yet, but this is a big step closer. What’s a little funny about is that it’s starting to make good on the idea of the WebTV, where people wanted access to internet-based content without the mucking around with a full-blown computer.

And while I thing the MacBook Air is extremely cool, it’s extremely second on my list for a Mac laptop. I’d still prefer a Pro, with the greater horsepower and whatnot, than give all that up for a computer that is, as they say, wafer theen. But! That ultraportability is definitely the way things are going to be going, and if I were wealthy beyond my dreams, it would be nice to have one muscular laptop for serious portable work and one lightweight one for, say, writing which could be used anywhere in relative comfort. And the solid state hard-drive is, as the kids are saying, quite rad. But I don’t think I’m ready to pay a premium for smallest just yet.

Crossposted with klech.net