MacWorld: San Francisco – Rentals & MacBook Air

Apple had their Stevenote today, and its a mixed bag. I was hoping for more, but in the end I think its the best Apple can do for now in the content arena since they have to work with the paranoid movie studios.

(You can find my predictions here, and a big thanks to ArsTechnica for the live feed on which I base my commentary)

First, as Steve traditionally does, he talked about how great everything is at Apple right now. And he should, since his job as the CEO is to sell shares in his company and value the price higher and higher (which is good for existing shareholders). How great Leopard was, the accolades it got, etc.

Time Capsule

What was so wrong with just letting us backup to remote disks? Even if you have to format them in a certain way, many users would have been happy buying a blank HD at Best Buy, hooking it up to their Airport Extreme and going from there. Instead Apple creates a proprietary device.

The “server grade” hard drive might sound like a nice idea, but the MTBF of consumer HDs are plenty for the average consumer, and since this is a backup device, losing backups isn’t that big of a deal as long as the user is properly notified at the time the HD fails and not when they go to retrieve a backup. A double failure of both the Mac and the backup drive is very unlikely.

The only thing good is that I might be able to pick up an Airport Extreme on the cheap as users now have to buy a Time Capsule if they want wireless backups.

Includes an Airport Extreme base station, $299 for 500GB, $499 for 1TB

Verdict: 2/10. Great idea, poor execution

iPhone

Apple reports that they’ve sold 4M phones, which is less than the 5M I had expected. Its still a ton of phones, considering how low their initial expectations are. I’d be curious to see what AT&T’s activation rates are though – are we still in a situation where 20% of iPhones are being bought to hack and taken to a different network (either in the US or outside the country).

iPhone firmware 1.1.3 will be released today, which includes the Location functions in Google Maps, SMS multiple people, Chapter titles, subtitles and lyrics in the iPod, and WebClips which allows you to view specific parts of webpages (or the entire webpage) and saving the icon on your home screen. Home screen customization is also part of this release.

The part that is hard to swallow is that while the iPhone gets the update for free, iPod Touch users who want the Mail, Stocks, Weather, Notes and Maps will have to fork over $20. Thats pretty crappy for someone who just spent $400 on your 16GB iPod Touch. The applications will be included free on every new iPod Touch sold.

Verdict: 7/10. Charging existing gadget customers for upgrades is lame (please note: gadget != Computer). Would have been 9/10 if it was free to all users.

iTunes/Apple TV 2.0

Movie rentals have finally arrived, and they’ve got all six major studios involved: Sony, Fox, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Time Warner and Disney. New releases will be $3.99, with older titles being $2.99, with the traditional online rental paradigm that you have 30 days to start watching it and 24 hours once you start watching it. HD versions of the movies will cost $1 more ($4.99 HD Rental, $3.99 library rental). You can also transfer them to the iPod and iPhone to watch them as well.

Once again there is a catch: movies wont be on iTunes until 30 days after the DVD is released. This is very disappointing, considering brick and mortar stores like Blockbuster don’t have this limitation on their new releases. But the studios are wary of making their movies available on demand. While it increase convenience for the end user, they worry that people will stop buying DVDs (which is too bad, because they already have) in lieu of rentals streamed over the internet into their home on-demand, with the movie starting in 30 seconds. This ties into an upcoming article about taming the digital medium and the problems with Hollywood releasing 100+ movies per year. In 2007, 42 movies were released that grossed over 100M at the domestic (US) box office (it could be 43 movies if Juno manages to climb above 100M USD before it leaves the theaters, its currently around 70M will strong showings week after week).

AppleTV 2.0 was something I predicted since I figured that Apple would need a new device that would be a cheaper and more integrated way to watch these rental movies. The new device deliver 5.1 surround sound and HD outputs. The new AppleTV will be $229, which is more than I had expected. Why pay $229 to pay more money to rent movies? They put a lot more functionality into the AppleTV like Flickr and more YouTube videos, HD podcasts, and the ability to buy stuff from the device. Its just not enough to justify the price, especially when a great up-converting DVD player is $70.

Verdict: 6/10. Getting every major studio online was great, but the 30-day delay is lame and the price on the AppleTV didn’t come down nearly enough.

MacBook Air

I can see why they call it the MacBook Air, the front profile reminds me of a flying saucer, its thin on either side and thick in the center. Apple wanted to stay in the full power notebook category (and not go to the sub-notebook category) and they did, with a widescreen, LED-backlight 13.3″ display. However the bombshell everyone expected about the completely solid state didnt come true, as the base unit has an 80GB 1.8″ HDD, with an optional 64GB SSD.

No optical drive of course, and the CPU is slower than traditional laptop chips – 1.6Ghz and 1.8Ghz speeds available due to thermal requirements most likely. The only outputs are USB, DVI (micro-DVI but DVI and VGA adapters are included) and a headphone jack. No firewire or ethernet port, which isn’t completely unexpected. I’m almost surprised Apple didn’t ditch the headphone jack and tell people to buy A2DP compliant headphones.

Multitouch is present, though some might argue that Apple has had multitouch trackpads for a while now (two fingers to scroll). Its gesture based, which might take some getting used to for folks who aren’t that computer adept.
Steve notes a five hour battery life, and while that might sound great its subjective. That five hours could be doing nothing but Word or Excel, with minimal wireless activity. How long will it last playing DVDs? HD Movies (decoding H.264 rented from the iTunes store of course)?

Two interesting things strike me with the MacBook Air. One is how Apple managed to persuade Intel to make a specific package interface for them to fit inside the MBAir. Other vendors might be irritated that Apple is getting special treatment, though I’m sure Apple is paying a premium for these chips and packaging.

The second is the remote install capabilities touted during the keynote. This sounds really great, not only for machines like the MBAir, but any Mac you’d like to install software to throughout the house. Is it possible that the next generation iMac models wont have optical drives either? The best part is that it works for Mac + PC as the host.

The price is $1799, which is a bit expensive for my taste. Even if I do manage to sell my MacBook (1st generation) for $700, its a good amount of money to put into a laptop that is the same speed as my current unit. And the upgrades are very expensive – $1000 for the upgrade to a 64GB 1.8″ SSD (which is an appropriate price, its just expensive).

Verdict: 8.5/10. No major gripes, only a few lingering questions as to how the unit will perform and the battery life is really 5 hours. It was a 9/10 until I saw it came with an “Integrated Mono Speaker” for audio.

Overall

Meh. I guess I was expecting a bit more, and definitely not expecting a bomb like Time Capsule. Nothing on BluRay, or the iPhone SDK other than a brief mention to let us know he hasn’t forgot and it hasn’t been pushed back. But I think I can see why Apple wants to pace itself. It seems to be a very conservative company in terms of announcements (not too many things at once, not too many great things at once).

Verdict 6.5/10 (not a mathematical average, its weighted)

I’m expecting a separate event next month to go into the iPhone SDK launch, and a stealth update sometime this month or next for MacBook Pros with the MacBooks getting their upgrade in April or May (like normal).