MacWorld SF – 2007 Edition

It looks like this is an annu­al thing for me, so I’ll give it anoth­er go. Angela and I are ever-so-slow­ly mak­ing the shift (back) towards using Apple hard­ware and soft­ware in our lives, so I do have quite a bit of inter­est in Mac­World each year. Plus, it’s nice to watch the stock jump! I’ll live-blog it as best I can from noon until 2:00 EST, so I apol­o­gize in advance if it makes your RSS read­ers go wonky with loads of posts (I hope that does­n’t hap­pen, anyway).

For on-going cov­er­age, you can turn to Engad­get or MacRu­mors.

iTV Apple TV – Apple Lands in your Living Room

Well, this looks great,to be hon­est. Frankly, this is like­ly the solu­tion I was look­ing for sev­er­al years ago when I pur­chased a Win­dows Media Cen­ter Edi­tion PC with plans to get a MCE exten­der for the liv­ing room. We bought a Haup­pague unit that real­ly did­n’t work very well at all in the mean­time, and then even­tu­al­ly went to TiVo when they announced TiVo ToGo. Of course, there does­n’t seem to be the PVR func­tion­al­i­ty on the iTV, which sucks for the short term but as every­one (includ­ing our house­hold) move to IPTV, this becomes the solu­tion to have. Down­load al a carte, use a PC or net­work else­where for stor­age, and then just net­work down to the big screen in the liv­ing room. Hav­ing a (albeit small) on board hard dri­ve allows for some stor­age but the adop­tion of 802.11n is going to real­ly make stream­ing HD video pos­si­ble (just like you all knew it would).

Ship­ping next month for $299. Pret­ty rea­son­able, giv­en this things capa­bil­i­ty and the cost of sim­i­lar devices (that do less).

iPhone – Apple Takes Control of your Pocket

Apple final­ly did it. Wow.

Well, I don’t know this is as rev­o­lu­tion­ary as Jobs claims it is, but it is nev­er-the-less very cool (and about time). I mean, I don’t yet see­ing this doing what the Apple II did… Still, inter­net, phone and iPod (real widescreen video, too) is a killer piece of hard­ware. It’s going to run OS X (or some very stripped down ver­sion, more like­ly) which, if they sell these phones like they sell iPods, will in turn sell many-a-mac. Once peo­ple get a taste for that inter­face, they’re like­ly going to want it in a PC.

Sync­ing every­thing on the phone with iTunes (or what­ev­er it’s going to be called) is great. This can’t be over­stat­ed. This is one of the great­est mys­ter­ies of how to get more out of a portable phone and the iPod has been doing it right for years now.

Oh, and of course it has a cam­era. Hope­ful­ly bet­ter than iSight or the cam­eras found on the vast major­i­ty of cell phones now (espe­cial­ly mine and Ange­la’s). It appar­ent­ly has an 8GB dri­ve (sol­id state or plat­ter, I don’t know which) and that is vast­ly more than any phone right now and actu­al­ly would be a lot of music (although not too many TV shows). I can’t tell, but I have a feel­ing it wire­less­ly syncs as well (based on dis­play, which looks to have a Air­port sig­nal icon). Ah looks like GSM+Edge+WiFi+Bluetooth. Wow.

I got­ta say, I want one. Angela is going to want one, too. This pro­vid­ed it does­n’t cost a grand. Looks like that means switch­ing to Cin­gu­lar wire­less, which is a bit of a pain (not that we love Sprint).

Also, Jobs played the Bea­t­les on the iPhone. Let the sig­nif­i­cance of that sink in for a moment.

Okay, I do have to say that after read­ing more of this pre­sen­ta­tion, Apple real­ly is about to release the next gen­er­a­tion in mobile phone. What’s more, it’s not a mobile phone any­more but a mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media device. Few of it’s capa­bil­i­ties are new but the (appar­ent­ly, as I’ve not used one yet) tight inte­gra­tion is real­ly what makes it next gen. Using an advanced oper­at­ing sys­tem (did any­one real­ly ever think Win­dows CE, Sym­bian, or Black­ber­ry was the pin­na­cle?) to bind sev­er­al devices togeth­er may not real­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ize elec­tron­ics, but it is going to bring this to the mass­es instead of the 1% high end tech elite. Oh, and it’s going to make Apple a mint.

Well, that’s all for me for now. I’ll fin­ish some of these thoughts up on Mac­World ’07 lat­er. There’s things going on today besides Apple and some of you may want to check that out lat­er, as well.

Okay, well, that real­ly looked like pret­ty much all the news. Apple also released a 802.11n device which looks pret­ty slick but, as with all their net­work­ing gear, is way over­priced in my opin­ion. They also changed their name to just Apple, Inc., which was a long time com­ing. How­ev­er, I’d like to point out one thing that was not men­tioned at their year­ly shock-and-awe-fest: OS X 10.5, Lea­pord. I’m real­ly dis­ap­point­ed that they are either push­ing this fur­ther back or just don’t find the upgrade worth dis­cussing. I’m hop­ing it still beats the iPhone to store-shelves (i.e. — by June), but I won’t put off buy­ing a com­put­er to wait anymore.