the Onda

So much for posting from the keynote. Thanks to my having rushed out of my hotel room, my EVDO card stayed behind and— as usual— AT&T's crappy EDGE network let me down. I was thus relegated to sending Twitter updates only about four-fifths of which made it to the site (for a humorous blow-by-blow, see here).

So the news is out: three new products which I would buy, Time Capsule (a .5/1.0 TB drive attached to an Airport Extreme for seamless backups through Time Machine), Apple TV 2.0 (along with a movie rental service that makes sense), and the MacBook Air. Brief thoughts on each of them:

Time Capsule: hark! the era of the home server has finally arrived! It's a great idea to start from backup and the features/price is right on this one. My one nit would be that Apple needs to find an intelligent software solution to partitioning large libraries (specifically iTunes and iPhoto) and doing a sync on/off from Time Capsule so that we can deal with our ever expanding digital lives and our ever shrinking laptop drives. Pure backup won't do it alone.

Apple TV 2.0: The movie rental service totally makes sense and I suspect the cooperation of 11 studios will allow them to crush all of the competition, but the most significant thing I saw in this product is that it finally brings place-shifting into the mainstream. Just like Tivo allowed you to timeshift content from when it was aired, and Apple TV 2.0 (plus iTunes, iPods, and iPhones) are going to let you start watching something on one screen and seamlessly transition it across 3-4 different screens as you consume it. It sounds geeky, but in an era when people are increasingly consuming content on laptop screens in bed, or entertaining kids through iPhones, it could be a killer feature.

MacBook Air: I had a chance to get into the exhibit hall 30 minutes early and let me say that this machine should go straight into an industrial design museum. It's almost like one of those Escher optical illusions when you pick it up— since the keyboard looks and feels real-size, you find yourself turning the machine around to look for the rest of a bulk that is just not there. The screen in bright and the "remote disk" stuff is timely as I find that my optical disk is almost useless these days. Overall I have two nits with it: first, the 64GB of solid state disk seems really pricey (something which Apple may not have a lot of control over) and even the 80GB disk won't be enough unless there is a software tool made available to partition iTunes and iPhoto libraries (see above). Second— and this may be the deal killer for me— there is no clear and easy way to use an EVDO or other 3G card in the machine. Why Apple didn't just bake this one in on the machine must have something to do with their AT&T exclusive, but as I struggle even now to get a Wi-Fi connection to let me in, I can imagine just how heinous this machine might be for road warriors used to the pleasure of EVDO.
And finally, what of the keynote itself? It was unlike any computer conference talk I've ever seen— much less geek and much more revival/rock concert. And to see Steve in his element is something fierce. He is poised and folksy at the same time— calm and good humored (even when the Flickr demo he was hoping to be the big close on Apple TV 2.0 borked on him) without seeming arrogant about the crazy success they've achieved over the last few years. My favorite moment was when he spoke candidly about how Apple TV 1.0 had been a flop and about how for 2.0 they had gone back and listened to exactly what the users wanted. Very block and tackle but also a sign of the more mature, wiser, elder statesman that he has become.

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