Ryan Chartrand
Click here to view a tour of the MacBook Air.
Click here to see the updated Apple TV.
While Apple fanboys were praying to their Steve Jobs shrines all night for the greatest overpriced gadget since the iPhone to be announced Tuesday, it’s sad to say that Apple won’t come away from 2008 with a revolutionary gadget that shakes up an entire industry all over again.
They will, however, make quite a stir once again in the laptop and digital downloads markets.
Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced at the end of his annual Macworld Expo keynote speech that in two weeks they will start shipping what he claims is the world’s thinnest notebook computer: the MacBook Air.
The Air is an ultraportable computer, which are stripped down versions of normal notebooks, except the Air sports a full-sized keyboard (both good and bad), weighs three pounds, has a 13.3-inch display and is only 0.76 inches at its thickest part.
There’s no way to really describe how unbelievably thin the Air really is, so you’ll have to check it out for yourself by clicking the link at the top of this article.
Its trackpad has multitouch gesture support, or the same touch screen-like capabilities of the iPhone, meaning you can pinch with your fingers to zoom in and out of photos or flick with three fingers to go forward and backward on Safari. Ultimately, it could make the Air feel like a 13-inch anorexic iPhone.
The notebook comes with an 80 GB hard drive, an Intel Core 2 Duo motherboard (clocking in at 1.6GHz) and 2 GBs memory. In other words, it’ll get most of your jobs done quickly and store a decent amount of data for the shocking size of the notebook.
The Air will have no DVD player, but for good (bragging) reasons: it comes with a wireless feature that lets Macs and even PCs share optical drives, such as a DVD drive, with the notebook. This means that you can wirelessly access the DVD drive on your computer upstairs to watch movies or install software on your MacBook Air, rendering the need for a drive on the notebook itself pointless (so long as it streams quickly).
But let’s not forget the fact that it can also mean more work on your part. As the fellow in the ad on Apple’s Web site says, “It’s easy,” as he walks to another room and back just to install software.
But the biggest shock wasn’t the missing DVD drive, which most ultraportables lack, but the fact that it’s like an iPod or an iPhone in that it has no battery for you to take out and replace. If it dies, it dies. Who wants to take a laptop out to an important event knowing that if it dies, you’re screwed? It could be one of the many reasons why Apple’s stock has dropped throughout Tuesday.
How much for the basic, run-of-the-mill MacBook Air without upgrades? The starting cost is $1,799, a steep price compared to their strongest notebook, the MacBook Pro, which starts at $2,000.
And while the MacBook Air is a breath of fresh air for the laptop market, Apple, prior to Tuesday, had some catching up to do in its digital downloads department.
When Amazon started Amazon Unbox, a movie rental and purchasing service launched in September 2006, Apple never really made a comeback. Sure, they had their own collection of movies available for download on iTunes, but it was still better to go out and buy the movie used from Blockbuster for a smaller price (and the quality and resolution would actually be fit for a television). On top of that, iTunes never offered any form of rental service.
Well, Apple is finally ready to compete with Amazon and others with the announcement of iTunes Movie Rentals and the Apple TV Take 2. While this is yet another step in the transition of film rentals from the physical market to the digital market (take a look at services like Vudu and TiVo’s collaboration with Amazon), Apple has really only dipped their toes in the water of the online rental pool.
Here’s what’s good and bad about their new rental service:
The Good:
- 1,000 movies will be available for rental by the end of February.
- Older titles will cost $2.99 and new releases will cost $3.99.
- HD movies will also be offered for $1 more.
- Apple has also somehow acquired every major movie studio (Jobs’ “Take that, Amazon!”), which explains the long wait for this announcement.
- Rentals can be watched instantly and download as you watch (nothing new).
- If you have the old Apple TV, there will be a free software upgrade for HD rentals.
- If you don’t have an Apple TV, Apple has been kind enough to cut the price to $229 (which is a good price, considering that it will be useful finally).
The Bad:
- Worst of all – Movies won’t be available for rental until 30 days after their DVD release.
- International support is still on hold.
- No TV shows will be rentable.
- Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound is not available with all HD rentals.
- Also, HD movie rentals will be available only through Apple TV. Great, just great.
- If you don’t finish a rented movie purchased on the Apple TV, it’s stuck there and can’t be transferred to any device.
- Finally, what I love about Amazon is prices even lower than $2.99, and sometimes popular movies will be $.99. Apple’s standard contract with the studios makes no room for these even more flexible prices.
For those of you who already own an Apple TV, you will be pleased to see the improvements made with the Take 2 software update. The video quality of the downloadable videos will finally look better on a TV (rather than the small, sized for iPod versions they used to expect users to blow up on their big screen TVs).
And finally, the Apple TV can purchase rentals, music and more wirelessly rather than requiring you to transfer it from a computer.
Overall, however, it’s going to take at least 3 months to get Apple’s rental service and the upgrades to Apple TV to be even worth considering as other services like OnDemand, TiVo, Amazon and the XBOX Live video downloads are already far better in both quality and selection.
The rest of Jobs’s announcements were more of updates to old hardware that should have been announced and released long ago, such as a few more flashy iPhone updates, iPod Touch updates that make it act like an iPhone for $20 and a device built for Leopard users that allows them to wirelessly store their backed up data somewhere else in the house.
What it all comes down to is that Apple has a different agenda this year. While they’re not turning industries upside down and revolutionizing the way you breathe, they’re bringing it back to the user.
Apple has always been known for its excellent customer service. Just go into an Apple store and you’ll experience it instantly. And that’s the mission this year: to make customers happy, ultimately by fitting the “Apple lifestyle.”
And how better to do so than bring it all back to the home experience; give customers easy to store laptops, movie rentals available by the click of a mouse and wireless devices that do all of the work for you.
Apple has a lot of work to do this year and if by this time next year Apple’s user base continues to grow, it will once again vindicate Apple’s philosophy that our digital lives can be condensed into a few simple boxes of hardware.